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Voices from the ghettos of the Nation's cities

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Washington, D.C.

November 1967

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LETTER OF T.RANSMITT AL

THE U.S. CoMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS

Washh~gton) D.C.) November 1967 THE PREsIDENT

THE PRESIDENT OF THE 'SENATE

THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Sirs: The Commission on Civil Rights presents to you this report pur­

suant to Public Law 85-3I5, as amended .. The report summarizes the testimony given at Commission hear­

ings and at open meetings of the Commission's State Advisory Com­mittees c.oncerning urban racial problems. The testimony-generally given by persons who live in slum ghettos or who deal with ghetto problems daily-provides insights into what slum residents think and feel about the conditions in which they live. Although the Commission has issued and will continue to issue in-depth reports on urban civil rights problems, we believe it is important to share with you as soon as possible what we have heard at our hearings and open meetings. We are transmitting a copy of this report to the President's Commis­sion on Civil Disorders for such use as that Commission deems appropriate.

We urge your consideration of this report and its conclusions. Respectfully yours,

JOHN A. HANNAH, Chairman EUGENE PATTERSON, Vice Chairman FRANKIE M. FREEMAN

ERWIN N. GRISWOLD

REV. THEODORE M. HESBURGH, C.S.C.

ROBERT S. RANKIN

WILLIAM L. TAYLOR, Staff Director

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·Contents Page

Letter of TransmittaL .............. 1'. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • iii Acknowledgments ....... . t. . . . . . . . . . . • .. . . . . .. . . . . . vii Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

. Chapter 1. ft • •• All We Can See is Darkness Ahetitd.n 5 I Felt Like I Was in a Cage 5. Children in the Ghetto 9.

Chapter 2. ff. . . A Slum Neighborhood Is What You Would Call It.n 13

A Bare House 13. Urban Destruction 15. Rats 16. Poor Services 18. Streets and Sanitation Services 18. Transporta­tion 19. Health Care Facilities 20. The Police ana the Ghetto 21.

Chapter 3. ffThe Main Problem Is Money." 27

Living on Welfare 29. Domestic Work 36. Exploita­tion 36. Business and Property 38.

Chapter 4. ffyou Just Can't Make It." 41 The Role of the Ghetto School 41. Economic Opportu­

nity 49. Job Training Programs 49. Exclusionary Union Practices 52. The Flight of Jobs 58. Housing 60. Owners and Realtors 61. Finance Industry 63. Builders 63. Role of Government 64.

Chapter 5. u ••• An Isolate~ Elite Type o/Community.n 69 Racial Isolation and Social Responsibility 69. RacialIso­

la.tion and White Attitudes 72.

Chapter 6. ffLook, Baby, Nobody Is Going To Help You But Yourself." 81

The Will to Act 81. Militancy in Minority Communi-ties 85.

Conclusion ....................................... . Footnotes ........................................ .

89 93

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Commission expresses its appreciation to the many private citi­zens and government officials who assisted the Commission staff mem­bers during the months of investig~tion and preparation for the hear-

. ings and open meetings. Special thanks are owed to those whose testi­mony at Commission hearings and statements at open meetings of the Commiss~on's State Advisory Committees in cities across the land form the basis for this report.

The Commission also expresses its gratitude to members of the Com­mission's State Advisory Committees, particularly the Committees in New York, Georgia, Tennessee, California, New Jersey, Indiana, Ohio, Massachusetts, Illinois, Texas, and Utah, whose reports and open meetings have been invaluable to the Commission in its consideration of urban racial problems.

'The Commission also is indebted to Howard A. Glickstein, General Counsel, and David Rubin, Deputy General Counsel, who directed the following members and former members of the Commission staff in preparation of this rcport: Edward Beis, George Bradley, Edna Bush, .sophie Eilperin, Jonathan Fleming, Sara Green, Treola Grooms, Sandra Hall} Mary Hanson, David Hunter, Wilbur Jenkins, Roy Littlejohn, Roger Lowenstein, Jo Nell Monti, Leda Rothman, Everett Santos, Richard Seymour, Celestine Sledd, Diann Stanley, Naomi Tinsley, Stephanie Wenkert, Ruth Whitaker, and Sheila Wilson.

Finally, the Commission is indebted to the many staff members who conducted and assisted in the investigations preparatory to the hearings and open meetings held during the past two years.

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Introduction

During the past two years the United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Commission's State Advisory Committees have held hearings and open meeting~in many of the Nation's urban areas. The hearings and meetings, held pursuant to the jurisdiction conferred

. upon the Commission by the Civil Rights Act of 1957, as amended, have been designed to study and collect information concerning the extent to which conditions in Negro slum ghettos and Mexican Amer­ican "barrios," or the actions or inaction of Federal, State and local governments with respect to such conditions, constitute a denial of equal protection of the laws because of race, color or national origin. They have served also to appraise the adequacy of Federal laws and policies to secure equal protection of the Jaws for persons living in these areas and have provided a forum for the dissemination of infor­mation concerning the denial of equal protection.

COlD:mission hearings were held in four Metropolitan areas: Cleve­land, Rochester, Boston and San Francisco-Oakland. In Cleveland, most of the testimony was heard in the Liberty Hill Baptist Church, located in the Hough ghetto. State Advisory Committee open meet­ings were held in Los Angeles, Newark, Boston, Gary, Atlanta, Nash­ville, Peoria, Oakland, Houston, New York City and Memphis.

The testimony-generally given by residents of slum ghettos or per­sons who deal with ghetto problems daily-often was vivid and pro­vided insights into what slum residents think and feel about the condi­tions in which they live, about white people, about government, and about American society. Emerging from the testimony is a picture of ghetto life which affords possible answers to questions sometimes asked by white people about minority groups, i.e., What do thtJ want? Why don't they work? Why can't they, like early immigrant groups, simply better their condition and move out of slum areas through personal ,effort? The testimony also has assisted the Commission in under­standing the nature and magnitude of the commitment this Nation must make if it is to remedy the economic and social injustice reflected in the Commission hearings and Advisory Committee meetings.

An explanation of the Commission's factfinding techniques may be helpful to an understanding of this report.

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~o o~tain relevant infor~ation, the Commission holds hearin.gs to ~hIch It may subpena Witnesses and documents. All testimony is given under oath. The 51 State Advisory Committees appointed by the Commission may hold open meetings to which citizens and public officials are invited to present their view!3 on the problems within the Commission's jurisdiction. The hearings and open meetings are held after extensive field investigations by the Commission staff.

Months in advance of the Commission hearings staff members con­ducted interviews with many persons representing various economic and social levels in the aret,s under investigation. In this process they talked with people holdio.g widely differing views. In: all more than 2,000 individuals were in~erviewed during pr~parations for the hearings.in Cleveland and the S .. m Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. For the hearmgs in Rochester and Boston several hundred people were interviewed in each city. People interviewed included residents of the ghetto, some who were in school and some who had dropped out, some who were working and so~e who were unemployed, some who were articulate and some who had difficulty in expressing their feel­ings, some who were on welfare and some who were not. In addition . . ., mterviews were conducted with members of civil rights groups and civic organizations, businessmen, school teachers and administrators,

. police officials, sociologists, psychiatrists, and elected and appointed officials at the Federal, State and local levels. In each city studied, staff members attended public meetings and visited schools, churches, bars, pool halls, lodge halls, grocery stores and barber shops to meet and interview people. .

The witnesses who testified at the hearings were selected to enable the Commission to explore the most significant issues resulting from the interviews. The Commission heard testimony from a variety of witnesses with a wide range of views.

This report summarizes the testimony given at the hearings and open meetings. It is hoped that in this way, the testimony will be brought to the attention of a wider audience than would be reached by the transcripts of the proceedings.

Because of the limitations of time, each hearing or open meeting was devoted to selected topics. Thus, the Cleveland hearing in April 1966 consisted of five days of testimony concerning housing, health, welfare; education, employment and police-community relations. The Roches­ter and Boston hearings in the fall of 1966 were limit(~d to testimony about equal educational opportunities for Negroes in those cities. At the San Francisco Bay Area hearing in the spring of 1967, the Commis­sion sought to explore in a metropolitan context a wide range of prob-

2

lerns in the fields. of. h~using and ~m~loyment for minority groups. Because of such lImItatIOns, some ImFortant issues only are touched lightly or not at all. Often the discussion of issues is not as exhaustive as would be expected of a research study. Nevertheless, certain problems emer~ed with sufficien~ c~arity from the recent hearings and open meetmgs ~o warrant. bnngmg them to public attention in this report.

In selectmg quotations from lengthy transcripts, the Commission was guided by the need for a concise report. Only major tupics and themes are covered. Interested readers witl. find further details in the full original transcripts of the Commission hearings which are availabl~ to the public. Transcripts of the State Advisory Committee meetings may be inspected in the Commission's office.

Mos.t of. the testi~ony in this re~ort is presented to show what people ~re . thmkmg and feelmg. The VIews presented, except as othelwise mdicated, are those of the witnesses, not of the Commission. The Com­mission believes nevertheless that the subjective views of people directly affected by or dealing with ghetto conditions merit the close atten­tion of the American people. What people think about the coriditions in which they find themselves often is, as important as the actual conditions.

:rhe natu~e of the <?ommission hearings and State Advisory Com­mIttee, meetings permItted slum residents and those who work with them to ~scuss t~eir problems candidly in a dispassionate atmosphere. T~e publIc and ~ts elected representatIVes, through listening to these VOIces, may obtam a better understanding of the conditions and the problems as they exist or are perceived in the cities of the Nation.

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rrI Felt Like I lVas in a Cage"

When they have to get out on th~ street at 14 or 15 they consider themselves to be a man and are going to take on sonte responsibility because he is the only man itz the house and he has little brothers and sisters in the house and he sees his mother and brothers and sisters going hungry, half starving and trying to get the rent in. It is a bare house, like it is a cold feeling even to be there and you -have to go out on the street and become the subject of the same thitJg out there. There has to be a breaking point.1

James A. Richards, a Negro youth with a prison record, helped stop the disorder which raged in San Francisco's Hunters Point for several days in 1966. He told. the ComIIiission:

One minute we are looking ahead and we think we see something and we tum around and again all we can see is darkness ahead. And sometimes at a time like this all t,l,.ey can do is strike out into the 1i.ight. They don't know what they are reaching for out there.2

The Hunters Point riot, he said:

.•. : w.asn't a major thi~g.It was just an idea to strike out at something and someone. Even if you don't do anything but break a window or a chair or something like this, you feel that you are hurting a white man or something like this because the white man is the one that is doing every­thing to you that causes you to have all these problems on younow.8

Charles Evans, an unemployed resident of Boston's South End slum, told the Commission's Massachusetts State Advisory Co'inmittee:

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r If nothing chan.gtlS' t.here is going to he trouble. People are tired of talking to them/elves: My grandmvther said things would get better and my mother said they're going to get better but I don't see any change. The cops keep pushing us, telling us to move Ott. Weare in perpetual motion.'

Mrs. Jacqueline Taylor, a Negro resident of Midtown West-a slwh ghetto in Gary, Ind.-felt that she was caught in a treadmill:

I mean outside ot this district time marches on .... They build better and they have better but you come down here and you see the same thing year after year' after year. People struggling, people wanting, people needing, and nobody to give anyone help.5

To Mrs. Taylor, her neighborhood was "a quagmire, a big quicksand":

••• just like YOtt step in something, yott just sink and you can't get out of it. You get in this place and, I don't know, there is something about it ~hat just keeps you. I guess it's the low adequacy of the housing . .. the low morals of the whole place. It's one big nothing. It's one big nothing. I mean you can live here for millions and millions of years and you will see the same place, same time and same situation. It's just like time stops here.

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Robert Jacobs, who once lived in a Negro public housing project on San Francisco's Petrero Hill, described the feelings harbored by the residents of that ghetto. t, He said they felt as 'if they were "in a cage, and I felt like I was in a cage." ,8 To Mrs; Charlotte Gordon, a Negro mother in Gary, her neighborhood was "more or less'a trap." 9 Asked what she would do if she had sufficient income, she replied:

The first thing I would do myself is to move out of the neighborhood. I feel the entire neighborhood is more or less a trap. If you check back and check the people on wel­fare now, nine times out of ten they are people that have been on welfare before ..•• 10

Charles Evans had even stronger feelings:

Being a Negro in Boston is the worst thing in the world ••. you have no way to communicate toith anybody. You can't find a decent job or a decent place to live.

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These feelings of hopelessness and isolation were recurrent themes in the testimony of slum residents.12 Mr. Jacobs described Potrero Hill

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as separated from the rest of San Francisco by an "invisible wall." 18

Walter Robin~o~; a community or~anizer, testified that the Negroes on Potrero Hill see themselves as Isolated people who have to go it alone because the other people aren't really concerned about them." 14

Edward Becks testified about the development of East Palo Alto a suburban California community of some 25,000 people which is ab~ut 80 percent Negro. It was his belief that "the East Palo Alto area has become more and more cut off from the general community" so that the younger generation in the community "has no concept of any social relationship with any people other than Negroes." 15 Guido St. Lauriant of the Blue Hill Christian Center in Boston attempted to

. convey the isolation 10 felt by people living in Boston's Roxbury slum:

You hear people talk about the suburbs, but Roxbury is really a suburb because we are out of everything. We don't get an" communication.17

This feeling of being "out of everything" is an aspect of the strong belief held by residents of slum ghettos that they are powerless/8 The Massachusetts State Advisory Committee, summarizing what it had heard at open meetings in March and April of 1966, reported:

A recurring theme during the four days of meetings was the powerlessness of the Negro community. Whether the people were discussing housing, employment, welfare, the ~ove:ty program~ education, or municipal services, they t.nevttably made the point that no one listens to them, no one consults them, no one considers their needs. More than a score of speakers pointed out to the Committee that the Negro in Boston ~s devoid of political power.1D

. ¥any.slum :~,'iden~s complained that they were not allowed to par­tl~lpate ill de~lSlons dIrectly affecting them. In Oakland, for example, WItnesses tes~lfied that urban renewal officials for many years failed to consult reSIdents of areas scheduled for destruction before formulat~ ing renewal plans. Mrs. Lillian Love, who had lived in Oakland for more than 40 years, testified that her family had lost three homes as a result of urban renewal projects. She said:

There has never been, except for the last fetl) years, any concern for what the people wanted. They were not even made aware or informed as to what was really going to happen.2o

One of the redevelopment projects which caused a great deal of

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resentment in the Negro community ~ Oakland was the Acorn proj­ect. According to Mrs. Love:

When the surveys were made it was said that there were only five houses that were worth saving in that area. This was not true . ... at the public hearing the protests thaI arose at that time-and it wks too late-indicated that the survey itself had not touched the people who occupied the

area.Zl

Mrs. Carole King, who belonged to an organization of welfare mothers in Cleveland, testified that she had suggested to welfare officials "that we all get together with county, State and Federal officials to sit down and discuss the problems." According to Mrs.

King: They seemed to think it was a ridiculous offer and what do we have to offer. They would probably be surprised. We probably could work something out that would ac­tually help the mothers and fathers that are on the welfare programs. Weare not even accepted as human beings . ... 22

In San Francisco, Orville Luster, Executive Director of Youth for Service, an organization working with unemployed youths, com­plained about not being consulted in the formulation of programs affecting his community.2s .

Negro witnesses felt that their destinies were not in their own hands, but in the hands of white people who live in the suburbs. Donald McCullum, President of the Oakland Branch of the National Associa­tion for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Chair­man of the West Coast Region of the NAAcp, testified:

Oakland is run or ruled by Piedmont, by San Leandro, Orinda, and Lafayette [white subttrban communities]. The base power of this community resides there. The

problems, the needs are here in Oakland.24

Mr. McCullum was asked about Negro representation in local

government:

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We have a City Council, and until just very recently there were not any Negroes on the City Council . ... But at the times that those in pOf,f/er determine that it is good and proper that a Negro be placed on the City

Council, such occurs.25

Children in the Ghetto Negro. children, as well as adults, feel isolated from the white

commu,nity. Calvin Broo~s, a graduate of a predominantly Negro high school ill Cleveland, testIfied at the Cleveland hearing that he had never known a white person until he was 14 or 15 years old:

Well, I had never known a person of my own age who was white because I was raised in a predominantly Negro area. I was educated in a Negro school, I went to a Negro church, and everyone I came in contact with was Negro and I didn't know anything about a white person in as far as their actions-I didn't think they were different. I just didn't know them. I didn't think they even existed because I looked at my arm and my face, it was brown and I thought that was natural because everyone else arou11d me was brown.26

. Mrs, Perc~ CUl1'11ingham, a teacher in an almos~ all-Negro junior high school ill Cleveland, summarized her students' attitudes towards the white community:

.. , I find that many of the students feel that the white c9mmunity is something that is way out, it is out of Cleveland. There is no white community in Cleveland as far as many of the pupils are concerned.27

Negro children also expressed feelings of hopelessness. Calvin Brooks described the impact of his school on its pupils:

... it had an effect because they were there and all they saw were Negroes and they were raised in an environment of poverty and the building was old and it had an effect I don't know of-of hopelessness. They didn't think that they could do anything because their fathers had common la,bor jobs and they didn't think they could ever get any hJgher and they didn't work, ,rome of them.28

. I~ CI~veland, Dr. Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist from Harvard UmvefSlty who has done clinical studies of Negro children in Boston :md ,Cleveland as well as in the South, testified about Negro children ill the.North. A. technique which Dr. Coles uses in working with chil-

I. dren ,IS to have them draw pictures of familiar things. He described , ; the pIcture a Negro boy drew of his home:

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T his ho~tse is a shambles,lt is a confused disorderly house for a chtld that can do better and has done better. He has

277-917 Q-67-2

much better drawing ability. The house is deliberately ramshackled. Thereisablacksk,y and what might passfo! a black sun orin any event a cloud of black. The groun1 tS

brown and not green, and there are no flowetlS. It tS a dismal place. There is a cross on the door. The child: told me that tJhe property was condemned.29

Children who live in slums, like children anywhere, are highly im­pressionable. Mothers who live in sluD?s, like mothers e~ery~here, are concerned about the effects of the enVlIonment upon thelr children. Mrs. Charlie Jones spoke of the difficulties of raising her children in a Gary slum:

Well, where I live this is really a slum neighborhood is what you would call it. And, well, you know, a lot of taverns around there, you know, a lot of people th~t doesn't live there. It's whiskey stores there. They wtll

, come and they will buy the whiskey and they si~ i~ tke car and drink it in this neighborhood beca~se thts tS 1ust.a slum and who cares. And all this, your chtldren see all thts. They have to grow up right with all this.50

Mrs. Ethel Plummer, a mother who lived in Cleveland's Hough area feared the effect that the environment might have on her son: ,

Well, Sam see a [pimp] with $125 suit and a big car and he feel that he won't have to go to scho-:.l because he can get the same thing that this other-have-well, they may watzt to do the crimillal things so they can get the same things that this other friend has and he may want to leave school for this easy life.51

Mrs. Taylor of Gary described her sh"Uggle to help her children overcome the effects of their environment:

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I try to show my children the beautiful things that are in ugUness. There are beautiful things in ugliness if you look at it, if you have the insight to look at it that way. And then I will tell them about different things and try to put adventure i1z their souls, they are still young, so they can pull themselves out. And maybe if they are strong enough or if I can pull them out, they can reach back and give me a hand and pull me out. Meanwhile I have to pull them out. I have to be a mother first and a woman second every time. I can not put my own feelings above anything else.52

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Negro children at an early age see that they are not accepted as equals in American society. Dr. Coles repeated a Negro youngster's explanation of why she drew a picture of herself sitting in the back of the schoolbus which took her from her neighborhood to a predomi­nantlywhite elementary school.

(t • •• [T]hey say they are going to stop us from coming here soon, and so no more bus rides.".

1 pressed on, ((But why are you sitting where you are in the picture?" ((If we arc going to leave anyway, we might as well sit in the back and then we can leave when we have to, then we won't disturb anyotze/~ 88

Dr. Coles told the Commission that Negro children "become con­fused and, at a very early age, filled with despair and depression" at the discrepancy between the ethic or rhetoric of equality in the North-4'what is proclaimed!'-and the actual fact-"what is", Be explained:

They doubt what is, they doubt the value of what is and become rather bitter, rather scornful, rather cynical, and I think at times, rather willful and unable to study, or un­willing to study. Many of the children I have talked with iti Cleveland, just as the children I have been seeing now, for almost two years, in Boston I see this world with a preci­sion and a clarity that I must say that I have not always seen. They see what jobs they will or will not be able to get. They see the futility of even the training programs that are offered them because they know the jobs that they ruill be trained to do will not be available to them in unions or in bessiness. They see themselves as cornered and they see the school as, in a sense, a mockery of society rather than a reflection of its best attributcs.84.

Miss Patricia Delgado, speaking for a group of Spanish-speaking high school students in San Francisco, testified about their frustration at what they feel is the hypocrisy in American society:

~ .• [W]e go to school and we all want to go to college. We want a good 'education and we set out for it. . . . We try to go to school and . .. the first thing we do is stand and we say the ,pledge. The pledge says that this is a free country and everything . .•. We go in our history class and we learn what a free country it is. Then we walk out of the

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school doors and it is the end of it. You go back ,to y~ur crummy little house a'iJd try to get a c~um,,?y lzttle lob a1Ul. all you knot/} is that y~ur acce~t tS ({t~e~;tzt from

. everybody else's and so you lust can t make tt ..

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A Bare House

[M]ost of the apartments are just rooms. Very few of them have complete baths and hot and cold water, the necessary things, the things that are required health wise they don't have, very few of them, hot and cold water, heat and this iype of thing. You just don't find too many apart­metzts in this area that have this type of thing.1

This was the way Mrs. Charlotte Gordon described the housing in her slum neighborhood in Gary. Housing in other slum areas often lacks the basic qualities which most Americans take for granted.2 Mrs. Rowena Stewart, a resident of Boston's South End, commented on the condition of housing in that area:

[A person] rents a broken-down room for $21 to $24 a week that is rat infested and has cockroaches runnitlg all over the place. There are holes in the ceiling where the plaster has fallen down atld the people have to share a bathroom. The so-called furnished apartments usually contain a few chairs, a table and an old rusty bed. . . . Frequently, social workers tell families to move out of tllese homes where the rents are too high, but they never find tltem decent homes where rents are l()wer.a

Mrs. Carnella Turner spoke of the conditions in her apartment at the Alhambra Village, a large tenement in Cleveland's Hough area which had been the scene of a rent strike staged by a civil rights group known as the Ohio Freedom Fighters:

The apartment was very dirty I an undecorated apartment. The plaster in the bathroom was all cracked up ••• and

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the bath tub, the water dropp,cd by drops., just a drop at • 4

a tIme."

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When the Freedom Fighters inspected the building they found many violations of the Cleveland housing code, including open sewage lines and leaking gas lines in the basement. At the request of the Free­dom Fighters, housing inspectors conErmed the violations and con- :0 i d.emned the building as unfit for human habitation.1S

The attitude of the owner of the Alhambra-subpenaed before the Comnussion-was that tenant complaints and notices of violations from the Division of Housing and the Division of Health were "part and parcel of any building whether it is here Of' Pepper Pike or the Gold Coast." 0 He claimed that he had attempted to correct conditions as tenants complained about them. The Alhambra file in the Cleveland Division of Housing, however, showed that identical recurring viola­tions had been reported each year since 1962.7

The tenants in the Alhambra had a landlord whom they could see and to whom they could complain. Many slum landlords, however, are corporate entities in which responsibility is so diffuse that there is no one to whom tenants can read.ily express their grievances.s

Mrs. Hattie Mae Dugan lived with her 13-year-old daughter in a .' th.ree-room apartment consisting of a bedroom, a vestibule which se.rved as a second bedroom, a small kitchen, a toilet and a bath. There were windows in only one room and none in the bathroom, in violation of the Cleveland Housing Code. The plumbing was bad, the ceiling dam­aged, the hallways poorly maintained. The front door of the building had no lock. After-hour clubs were operated in vacant apartments in the building. One vacant apartment had been vandalized and left open in a state of disrepair for weeks. Mrs. Dugan was not sure who owned the building because the certificate of occupancy was not posted as required by law.

She described what happened when she tried to complain about lack

Wl1en Negroes began movin int ell' landlords subdivided apartme!s ~d e~e an~ s Hough area in 1957, Woods-the second Negro to m . re uce services. Mrs .. Velma apartment building-described ho:

e m~o the Clevelander, a 40-unit mamtenance was cut back'

When I d . . ~.ove mto the Clevelander in 1957 th

two famt7tes of custodians 0 f' J ere were work Ilt 7 o'clock in th .:. ne a~tl~ would start J'() One of the husbands ~::,o11Zmg un~tl3 In the afternoon.

the husbands worked in tt:v~n:ng.t;g.) an[dTJthhe otkher ~f very cle' . . . . eY cpt It kept it u;~J ... It was a fabellotts apartment, they really

T hen,no sooner they t th h . but the colored in, th!; m: wd tte peopl~ ou: and nothing

~bout nine children, Ilnd t%:y ~:;;~~dlkan.~~ th~re with Just went down, do(un down tt' eerwg It up. It dated . ... 10 ' un t It was . .. dilapi ..

Morris Thorington a Ne b' plained how building; in thega

ro dusm~ssman in the Hough area, ex-£ ... rea etenorated "da b d " orcmg the residents to move el h d 1 Y yay, eventually

stand vacant and abandoned: sew ere ~ eavmg the buildings to

r;efn :!z~~Ot~ bU;ldi11ft. thll~ is a,little bit better, a build­

in which maYbe~%~ ~;~~g IS ~ ~ttlke less ~a1J ~ butldi11g you do have some t o~sn t ~a. or a buddtng where this [deteriorated] ~~:l1 tOilet Jac;ltties. SQ nobody evants worse than the one t ;~~ a~ t ey left because it is even

~:;f,::/::J.!' ft0a~:~"Is .'~/:.. ~~:c~~!jn;::,:~ It just stands there . .. . 1~e cIty won t do anything with it.

of adequate facilities in her apartment: Urban Destrttction

14

I'll tell you when you start complaining about that par­ticular building no one seems to want to own the building. When I first started to complain, [ started with one realby company and I complained so long and loud they sent someone else out and then 1 complahled to him and they sent someone else out . ..• Now we complaitl-it's five of us are complaining now • •.• The only time anybody really 'wants the building is when it is time to pay the rent and after then nobody wants the buiiding.o

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The inadequate housin bli h " nesses in Hough were n~t alfe:i:~ tetenorau?n, described by wit­program. In Hough urban r 1 y that CIty s urban renewal " b ,eneWa was in M Th . ur an destruction" 12 H h ' r. arIngton's words there, abandoned T' he Ouses thsc. eduled to be demolished were "still 1 . yare no mg but . urns, prostitutes or what have " a meetmg ground for hood-you.

They . h wants:

e Just t. ere, just shells, that deter anybody t.hat

away, be::u~: ;Ze~h:r~:~!;::FTth:.:e or four,,fivc blocks • I).,,'$e vacanczes are bad.

15

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, had-ow over the whole street. At night, it is They tJe cast as. l'J,e a ghost tOU!1Z,lS . bl ' ZI\: ...' ' Mr ~ Thorington was tracea e ,m

The detenoratlon descnbed by 1 fficials several years earher part to a decision by local urban r~ne~ d~ in Hough and other areas not to enforce the Cl", veland H;ousmg old that one apparent rea-

114 Testimony revea e '1 designated for renewa . d f ment was the desue to ceep son for the decision to suspend ~~ e en orce

property acquisitio~ ~os.~s low. rtment of Housing and Urban D,e-Although an officlal or the D~pa f de enforcemellt was impermls-

velopment testified that suspens~n 0 ~~tions 16 'from 1962 to 1966, the sible under Federal statutes an fregu l'l'ance with urban renewal

f 'I d to en orce comp , Federal Government a1 e , Cl 1 d 17' This failure led, m part, to housing code requirements m ~~ a~ , on 18

the conditions descri.bed by Mr. ,or1r:gtb t d' to dIe deterioration of 1, I{ gh also contrl u e

Urban renew a m ou , t d that: , M Thonngton repor e surround111g areas r. . re etting these people

Mount Ple~sant ~nd Glenvtl;%; H~ugf area. I say ((driven that are betng drttJen

f o;t of don't want to go. They are be­

oul' because a lot 0 t em h . t 0 small to hald them. , d' t an area t at tS 0 • mg compact~ mOd d . to another ghetto. You are 1ust They are bemg crowe mE /; to Glenville, to MOU1zt moving your ghetto from ~Ug 1 d and Shaker Heights Pleasant, a1zd finally to Lefc- a~~~~e But the whole thing and God knows where to rom hI 'h I city.10

Il . to erode t e UI 0 e is evetttua Y gotng f th location of re:,idents,

By failing to provide adequately?r e rde the racial density of 1 program mcrease l' h

Cleveland's urban renewa 'b d t the very conditions w llC surrounding ghettos and contn ut~o <;>

urban renewalis designed to prevent.

Mrs. Ethel Plummer, who also lived in Hough, testified that she had rats in her apartment. Commissioner Hesburgh, who had visited the Hough area, inquired of Mrs, Plummer about a yard near the build­ing in which she lived that looked to him to be a rat runway. She responded:

It is. They had a recreation center there last summer, but after that closed down, then the rats took over.28

Mrs. Plummer's son, Sam, aged 14, was asked how many rats there were in the runway:

SAM PLUMMER: There is a lot. COMMISSIONER HESBURGH: What is it-IOO, 200 or what? SAM PLUMMER: So many, you can't count them all.24

In 1962, Clyde Fehn, a Sanitary Engineer with the United States Public Health Service, Communicable Disease Center, conducted a study of rat conditions in Cleveland, and found that of 25,000 struc-

c. tures inspected, about 7,000 had rats on the premises, and about ~ 14,000 had :inadequate facilities for storing refuse.2l! Mr. Fehn's . report concluded that "infestations constitute a large and wide­

, , spread problem in Cleveland, resulting in numerous rat bites, un­\ necessary anguish, and much property damage." 26 It was found ; that between 70 and 80 people each year report rat bites to the city

health department and it was estimated that "the total economic loss \ due to rats in Cleveland is at least four million dollars per year." 21

William Murphy, head of the Fuod and Drug Administration, \ Cleveland Health Department, one of the agencies responsible for 4 rodent control, testified that "there are probably a lot more rat bites '\ than" the number reported.28 In a re-survey of rat problems in Cleve­;land conducted in February 1966, Mr. Fehn found that "[l]arge and \ widespread rat populations continue to flourish in Cleveland, par­#cularly ill substandard areas," and that "[m]any interior infestations

Rats .' ditions generally are ac-Dilapidated and overcrow?ed hOUS111~ con

',in houses ~U1d apartments were noted." 29 He concluded that the rats ;constitute .a very serious menace to health in Cleveland.so

t Dr. Joal'me E. Finley, then Deputy Commissioner of Health in Cleve­land, testiiied about diseases borne by rats: companied by serious infestatlons of rats. problem in her neighbor-

Mrs. Dugan was asked whether rats were a

hood: ..' partment the rats got in Yes, they are. I was ltvt~gtn. 0~;;livi1tg in ;he same build­bed with me and my, stste~ tS s: and down. The kids they ing and the rats are lu~Ptng P with a dog or some­play with rats like a chtld t{)Ot~ldd :~:~ouse and thittgs like h· They chase them aroun t tn~ . this.22

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i T)~ere are a number of rat-borne diseases. Leptospirosis is

\ . , \ : 1

d

a common one, there is a very severe form of this called Wild's Disease efJhich has the same organism that causes it but it is a more severe form and death can occur. There are some others pretty debilitating but not necessarily death-dealing. They are called haverhill fever, relapsing fetler, ratbite fever, and so forth.81

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completely i$nored IUS. Our street is dark and though we Poor Services , . h have been writmg letters and we ave been getting some

One important· problem faced by residen~s of slum ghettos is the ' answers, nothing has happened. I feel it is because this inadequacy or unavailability .of services, WhIC~ ~~st people take for area is predominantly Negro. If it was any other area they granted. Many of these services are public servIces. would have gotten action.

as

Streets and Sanitation Services. In Boston, Mrs. Pearl Le~ co~~ Complaints of inadequate and discriminatory service are not re~ pared trash collection in the Roxbury slum w~~ trash ~ol1ectlOn m stricted to low income neighborhoods. Mrs. Genevieve Jefferson, white, other areas of the city with which she was f::mIhar: is a resident of Merced Heights, a predominantly Negro neighbor~

It does not take a genius to figure out that these str~ets hood of single~fami1y homes in San Francisco which once had been haven't been swept in five or six months. When we lzved predominantly white. She recalled that local government agencies on Beacon Street the street sweeper was there every m01'~~ became less responsive to the neighborhood's needs as Merced Heights ing with water and brtJ-shes, but you go up to Blue Htll changed from white to Negro: Avenue on Friday night when the store owners put out Well, back when we were a neighborhood in transition the trash and it's still there on Tuesda~ when they come t? .. , which was, oh, someplace back about 1961 and 1962, pick it up. If it requires pick~up five ttmes a week, then tt we began to notice little things and, as I think about them should be picked up five times a week· . now, they were petty little things and they really don't I now live in the Back Bay [predominantly white] where have much significance, but the streets didn't seem to we have two trash pick~ups a week, on a street, that only be being deaned as often as they were previously . ... has at most 15 houses on one side. On Blue Htll Ave~ue Another very little thing, but it still made me mad at the where you have a combinati01z of businers and multtple time,was, we were having trouble with the dogs and the dwellings you have one trash pick~up a week·

sa city has some nice little signs they put up on telephone

In Newark, Willie Wright, resident of a Negro slum; told the New poles, which say ((Curb Your Dog." So we wrote to the Public Works Department asking if we could have some

Jersey Advisory Committee: . of these as an educational device, and we got tht: answer My street in particular on several occasions this year has that the budget did not permit, but they would keep our been piled with garbage for as long ~ ~ve days. I, was request on file, and when there was some money we constantly in touch with ~he Cit~ SamtatlOin Department could conceivably be considered. tor"theremotlal of thiskJnd 'Of thmg. The Board of Health f Well, I first noticed one neighborhood had gotten signs, I also reported the incidents to them. and we had none, and finally the point where I noticed And as usual, they are slof.() about rea:tin;; to abs~~tee the second one which had gotten signs, and which tuas landlords and concerning themselves em.th the co~dttlOns , a new a1'ea •.. I was furious, but it was this kind of in which people in the Negro commumty must lwe. t/zing.s6. ~ These are facts that exist for most of us who live in e.he Transportation. Metropolitan transportation systems often do not Centrp) Ward. All you have to do is travel throug~ i:h

y j service slum areas adequately even though, slum residents are almost streets on any given day and you will be able to testtfy to 1 entirely dependent on public transportation.at A major concern after them factually also.84 .! the riot in the Watts area of Los Angeles was to improve public

Mrs. Merle Springer, who lived in Roxbury, reported municipal;l transpor~ation from Watts to the commerciar' 'areas of the city-a neglect of streets in her neighborhood: 'I step whIch had to be taken before unemployment in Watts could

In the section of Roxbury in which I live we have been ! be attacked effectively.s8 In the course of the Commission's urban fighting for street lights for quite some time. But they have .\ investigations, other examples were encountered.

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• 18 '

Walter Robinson described the hardships caused by' the poor pub­lic transportation facilities serving the predominantly Negro Potrero ' Hill public housing project:

[T]he public housing sector is very much isolated from any kinds of services. There are no medical facilities, no shopping centers, no drug stores. It is an area that is completely isolated and the transportation i1~ this area is very, very bad.39

Mr. Robinson stated that there were only "two doctors on the Hill and they are there by appointment only and ,the nearest place they can get medical attention is at San Francisco Public General Hospital," several miles away.40

Although white residents of Potrero Hill had no better services, the impact was sharpest on the people who lived in public housing because they often did not own automobiles and taxicab drivers were reluctant to come to the area. Robert Jacobs, a Negro, who once lived on Potrero Hill told the Commission that "on certain occasions I have , . waited for something like four or five hours just to get a taxI to come four or five blocks with groceries for. my family. You cannot get a taxi at night":

At one time I had sickness in my family and I tried to get a taxi. I had to pay an additional $35 just to get my child to the hospital, because the taxi said they couldn't find it: and they didn't want to come out there.41

Health Care Facilities. Because qf poverty most people who live in the slums must rely upon public services to an even greater extent than others. Yet the public services upon which they depend often are not accessible to their homes in the ghetto.

In Cleveland although the greatest health problems were concen­trated in the East Side Negro areas, the only public hospital was . located on the West Side. In 1963, seven of every 10 mothers who de- " livered babies at Metropolitan General Hospital lived on the East Side, , more than three and a half miles from the hospital. Mrs. Plummer, mother of seven children, was questioned about what it meant to travel to the opposite side of the city for maternity care. She testified ~at in : order to get prenatal care at Metropolitan, where two of her children !

were born, it requir~d "an hour and a half to go there and an hour an? i a half to come back." When she arrived at the hospital she had to Watt for treatment 42 •

Inaccessibility of health facilities reduces opportunities for expectant :

20

mothers t? ~et neede~ pren~tal ca:e. Dr. Finley testified that according to obstetrICIanS, the walk-m dehvery rate" at~Metropo1itan Hospital

... averages from 15 to 20 percent per month. This goes higher than that in some months.

Tht's means women who come there to get their babies born have had no prenatal care at all and these are generally Negro women.4S

In C~eveIand the infant mortality rates in Negro communities were approxll~ately 40 perce~t higher than in white communities; pre­mature b1ft~ rates were ,0 percent higher; and deaths in the first months of life were 70 percent higher. Dr. Finley attributed the higher Negro ~fant mortality rate, in part, to the lack of prenatal care for a subst~tlal number of expectant Negro mothers!' Resldent~ of. slums are short-changed in . the availability of public

health servIce~ 111 othe~ ways. In Cleveland, for example, staffing prob­lems confronting public health units were most acute in Negro areas. In Nove~ber 1965, of the eight vacancies among public health nurses, seven, WIth a planned work load of 4,000 cases, were ill areas 80 percent Negro or mor.e.

45

Thus, in ~e very locations where the health problems were most serIous? the pubhch~alth services available were substantially short of the publIc health servIces available elsewhere in the city.

The Police and the Ghetto

Many nonresidents are attracted to slums as Mr Thonn' gton put l't "to do their dirt": ,. ,

It ~s not that Hough is a morally decayed neighborhood. It IS rather because Hough is .decayc..d that it is drawing these morally-decayed people t11to it because people come from all. otler the ci~ to do their dirt down there at Hough.'o .

DominickA. Spina, Director of Police in· Newark N J testified that·· much of the' bl' th ' .. ,

d cf1m~ pr,o em m e Scudder Public Housing Project was cause by nonresidents of the project: .

[BJecause of the fact that there are so many people in these c.lose area:. They become a kind of Mecca, an attractIon fOr lotterers coming into the project who creote these problems.

Another important problem in these projects is the fact that they are almost entirely ringed by taverns and these

21

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taverns unfortunately, especially when the patrons Strcam out of them at night time, under an alcoholic fusc, they walk down the street and they walk into these projects and create more problems.

47

A Negro minister, Rev. Robert V. Parks, testified in Cleveland:

It has got so bad in our area until the word has got ?ut all over the United States that the Hough area, partzcu­larly 105th and Euclid Avenue to 79th and Euclid, is where the action is. You can. walk 'tIP and down the street any time of the day or night and observe C;adillacs, Lincolns and all fine cars from all parts of the country driven by pimps who come into Cleveland to thrive on prostitution because the word .has gotten out ~ll o.v~ the United States that Cleveland tS where the actIOn ts.

, Witnesses complained that the police tend to accept vice and crime as normal in slum areas. In Boston, Rev. William B. Dwyer, Vicar of

St. Stephens Episcopal Church, said: W hite h~nters from other parts of Bostot1- are constantly coming into the South End to pick up girls ana the police are doing nothing about it. Drivers &"t'uise up and down the street, seekin.g out prostitutes. I don't know whether it is by tacit agreement of the city fathers or what, b,ut anything goes in the South End. The So'uth End Polz,ce Protection Committee has filed with the Boston Poltce over 300 car registrations [of such drivers], but we have seen no noticeable improvement.

49

Christopher Hayes, Chairman of the Boston South End Federation

of Citizens Organizations, -stated: Police have isolated the South End as an area} giving it only token protection. Prostitution} bookmaking and after-hour places are all over and there is an excess of liquor stores and a shortage of foot patrolmen to keep the street safe. A hotel located near police headquarters} and known throughout the city as a house of prostitut!~n} w~ closed by police after a Boston newspaper publtct~ed tt. But it opened again after about two month~ and tS now back in business.GO

'. l Rev. Parks stated that there was no doubt in his mind that the police' 1

were aware of organized crime in Hough: \ \

22

Our biggest crime rate is within two blocks of the Fifth l '\

l I

Disbt'ict police station which is at l07th and Chester •• •• There is no doubt in my mind that the police do knoUl what is going on because I see them crttiting up and down the street} calling the girls to the car, the girls leaning on the cars and talkjng to them and gO'ing right back on the street and continuing doing what they have been doing ali along . •. . In my opiniO'n} the breeders of the crime in the Hough area is the white community which is paying for most of the crime committed in our area. You take prosti­tution-it leads to robbery. Robbery leads to murder.G1

. Wi:nesses also complained that police were slower in responding to calls ill slum areas than they were in white areas. Police resources are not necessarily committed to particular areas in proportion to the crime rate. Commission attorneys examined 1965 police communications records in C!eveland to dete~m~e whether police officers responded to c~ls . for assll;~ance less rapIdly m the predominantly Negro Hough dIstrIct ~an m p:edominantly white districts.52 The study was con, cerned ~lth .the tlD:~e lapse ben;eenf'eceipt of a telephone call by the commu~lc~tlOns u~lt ~d. the tune a police car was dispatched to the scene. Slgmficant dispantles were found. A Commission staff attorney testified:

[T] ?ere were 13 major categories of colIs involving police ~e~vtce .. In ~o,:l?f these categories-forcible rape and hom­icide-tnczde1Jts did not occur in all of the districts studied. In 10 of the 11 remaining categories, police response to calls UlflS slower in the fifth district [Hough] than in the first an1 second districts. In none of the 11 categmes was the poltce r~sPQnse quickest in the fifth district. In one of the categortts-robbery-the police took olmost four times as long to respond to calls in the fifth district as in the sec­ond district ~here response was the next slowest. In two of the cat.egO'rt~s-(1) burglary without larceny and house­bre~ktng WIthout lar.ceny} and (2) auto thefts-it took the po!zce more than tWIce as long to respond as in the district w?th the next slowest response. In the category of arrest for dIsorderly conduct, the police took almost'twice as long to respond as in the district with the next slowest response.1l8

Mr. Thorington described the difficulties he experienced because of the lack of adequate police protection: .

I have even been turned down by mer(:hant salesmen that I '

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want to do business with •.. because the drivers refuse to service ~'n the area. There's one driver who services my place [who] has been held up about three times. This boy is afraid to come over there. We have so many itlStances like that . ... I don't know whose responsibility it is 01' whose fault it is, but there is not sufficient police protection there.54

In Boston, Rev. Virgil Wood, a resident of the city's Roxbury area, told of the difficulty one Negro family had in getting the police to respond to a call for assistance:

One family had called the police because of an incident in the at'ea. They waited JO minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes and there was no response. Then someone was smart etlOugh to think of calling the police, saying ((Get out here quick, there is a Negro beating up a white man." The police were there in two minutes.55

Alienation between citizens and the police is characteristic of slum communities, ~here police often are viewed with hate, fear and sus­picion,50 A common belief in slum areas is that policemen regard their role as one of protecting the white population from the residents of the slum. Rev. Wood stated: "A zoo keeper attitude is maintained [by the police] toward the residentS' of the community." 57 Rev. Parks tes- . tified that the Cleveland Chief of Police, in opposing the abolition of capital punishment, had proclaimed publicly: "We need capital pun­ishment in order to keep 'the Negro in line." 58

There also is a strong feeling in slum areas-and among middle-class Negroes as well-that the police do not treat Negroes as human beings entitled to respect and dignity.59 The complaints range from physical manhandling to verbal mistreatment. In Cleveland, several Negro wit­nesses gave accounts of rude and discourteous treatment by the police.

James Malone, a Negro, who was Director of the Surgical Research Laboratories at Western Reserve University, testified that when a . woman was injured in an automobile accident, he sought to enlist the aid of four policemen who were having coffee and watching television : in a nearby hospital cafeteria, The police, he said, considered the request II i for assistance to be an imposition. He testified that although they I j reluctantly accompanied him: . I

l

... two of them sort of escorted me outside by taking a : I hold of my arms. When we got into the corridor, I told il them to let go of me and not to touch me unless they were ! I going to arrest me. I said, "I am here to enlist your aid." 60 , . (

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One of the policemen, Mr. Malone testified, shoved him around and called him "boy". 61

Mrs. Margaret Weathers, a Negro employee of the Cleveland Division of Recreation whose many community activities included . membership in a police-citizen community relations committee ap­pointed. by the Mayor, testified that in December 1964, while driving h?me WIth her four-year-~ld daughter on a rainy night, a police officer ticketed her for approachmg too near a red traffic light. According to Mrs. Weathers, the. officer told her: "You appear in court next Friday." ~s. Weathers testified that when she told him she could not appear . m court that day because she had to be out-of-town, the policeman

... took ~n~( kept my driver's license, he took my keys and he satd, You are under arrest, we are going to tow your car in, we are going to take your daughter and turn her over to police officials and you m'e under arrest." 62

She testified further that she was detained for an hour and that whe~ the p.olice wagon arrived on the scene there were se~en police­

men, mcludmg a sergeant; her daughter was crying, and Mrs. Weathers was very disturbed. Mrs. Weathers said the. sergeant released her with the following comment:

You better be glad that your daughter is here and ~'he is disturbed and you are riding in on her coattail. That is why wearereleasingyou.68

1:'frs. Weathers and Mr. Malone testified that they believed that the police would not have treated them as they did if they had been white.

The police view matters differently. John Ronayne, a retired Inspec­tor of the ~~~w York City Police Department who was retained by the CommISSIOn to study the Cleveland Police Department testified that the police '

• ~ . f:el that most of the complaints about cz'vil rights VIolatIons by the police are not justified. They have indi­c.ate~ that they believe that most of them are politically tn.sptred, that. they are used to unite the Negro commu­ntty for pOSSIble use in election campaigns . .. [t]hey feel that they are in the middle 01t this . ... 64

~ .~leveland, however, there was no effective channel for com­plamm~ about, and resolving the merits of alleged police mistreatment. The po~ce departme~t never had publicized any procedure for making complamts about police misconduct. Clarence Holmes, a Negro attor­ney m Cleveland, testified that a major issue in the Negro community

27'l-9J!l' 0-67-3 25

...

, as the "m' adequate investigation by the police authorities, once a '. "'1

:mplaint is made against a policeman •••. " GIS • • .\

Not o~'lly were the channels of communication to police authontles f

unclear in Cleveland, but Negroes who did present grievan~es w~e discouraged from pursuing them. District commanders had discretion to determine how they would handle complaints.

oo G:rald Rademake~,

commanding officer of the police district encompassmg Hough, te~tl-fled at the Cleveland hearing that when somebody "makes a complamt which on its face is facetious, doesn't appear to have any ground at a.11 " 6f he tells the complainant:

, Look, investigating complaints takes quite a bit of tim;c and manpower so this is what I am prep~re~ to do-I w~ll have the police officer u'hom you have zndtcqted ~as v~o­lated your rights submit to a lie detector test~ If thzs poltce officer is found to be lying, I will ~o ~ot(lntown and make sure that he is reprimanded or dtsmtsse1 from .the force. On the other hand, I want you to submtt ~o a l,e detector test and if it proves that you are lying, I u'zll persot?ally ~o down to see the judge and see that ~ou be gwen s:x months in jail and fined $1,000 for filzng a false clatm with the police department.o8

The inspector told a Commission staff investigator, and co~~;med at the hearing, that "this practice usually resolved the matter.

26

The main problem is money . ... That is our main problem, money. . . . But even with my working, the money I get from UJork and the money I get on AFDC, it is still not sufficient to live deccntly.1

Mrs. Alyce Friels, a resident of Gary, was identifying what she thought was the principal problem of ghetto residents in that city. The problem of money is a general one in slum areas. A substantial percentage of nonwhite families have an annual income of less than $3,000.2 In Cleveland's Central West area, one-half of the nonwhite families reported incomes below $3,000.8 In Boston, about 31 percent of nonwhite families had incomes below this amount."

In November 1966, the Department of Lab~r surveyed slum areas in eight major cities of the United States in order to obtain a more detailed picture of employment and poverty problems. The· Depart­ment's report showed that almost half of the families surveyed received income solely from sources such as welfare or AFDC, unemployment compens;Jtion, or other nonemployment sources.5

The Labor Department's study took into account not only persons who are unemployed and looking for work but also persons not counted in the standard unemployment statistics-people working part-time but seeking full-time work, heads of households under 65 years of age employed full-time but earning less than $60 per week, persons who are rIot heads of households employed full-time but earning less than $56 per week, and unemployed males of working age not looking for work.6 In the predominantly Negro Bayside district of Oaldand, the study found that the sub employment rate-based on all these cate­gories-was at least 30 percent} Twenty-four percent of Bayside fami­lies reported annual incomes of less than $3,000 and 10 percent of Bayside men 35 to 44 years of age had just given up-they were neither working nor looking for work.8

27

Many older Negro men have been displaced by automation because Negroes tend to hold unskilled jobs which are made unnecessary by machines. Dr. Carlton Goodlett, a physician, newspaper publisher and former President of the San Francisco Branch of the NAACP, discussed this problem:

... [T]he machines are replaci1zg the least technical workers and where you have hundreds of people who formerly operated elevators, and many people who were janitors, machines [are] doing these types of work now, and the Negroes who have acquired jobs in this industry that are being automated are the first to be fired because they lack seniority . .. and a tremendous number of people are in the mt'd~passage years between 42 and 65. T key are too old to compete in an automated society, but yet too young to go on social security, and this is the helpless gen-­eration .... The hope is very bleak for them.9

Unemployment among teenagers ill an even more serious problem in slum areas.10Jn the Bayside district, 41 percent of all teenagers were unemployed; U in the Fillmore-Mission (predominantly Negro and Spanish surname) district of San Francisco, the rate was .35.7 percent.t~ An unemployed teenager in a slum ghetto-unlike an unemployed white middle~c1ass youth-is likely to have no family to support him. On the contrary, he is apt to feel responsible for providing support for his family-among them the mother, brothers and sisters of whom James Richards spoke.

Mark Comfort, who worked for more than two years with Negro youth in Oakland, told the Commission that Federal programs were providing jobs for only a small fraction of those who needed

Rev. Paul Younger, a minister in the Hough area of Cleveland testified: '

... most people want jobs at a living wage. Some of our youth have gotten to say, (1 don't want that funkY old car wash job where you work for a whole day' and come out with 50 cents to a dollar and in some cases not even enough for carfare home.' No, they want a job that will buy their way into the American way of life.15

Orville Luster told the Commission that these young men did not want "dead end" jobs:

Our whole attitude and idea about a man's worth is where ~e works, ~hat he is 1oing, whether t't is a meaningful lob, and,thts type of thtng. Naturally~ a lot of kids are not only trytng to find some way of making a living, but they are trytng to gain some dignity, some type of recogniti01~ and being able to be men.10 '

Mr. Luste.r was asked how the young people in his group-70 to 80 percent unemployed--subsisted. He said:

" .. 1 th~nk that some of the young people who do get tnvolved tn some of the antisocial acts, they do this because of desperation a lot of times, and sometimes it is just for kicks, but 1 think that because they do not have a lot of m~ney, .s0m.etimes they are motivated to go out and com­mtt antisocial acts. And a lot of times it starts oD with just the need for the bare 1Jeccsst'ties.17

Living on Welfare

employment: For children in families with an absent or handicapped father, for ... this year you will have anywhere from between wo~en w~o must supP?rt their children, for the aged and the disabled, twenty and twenty-!ive thousand black youth on the ! publIc aSsIstance often IS the principal means of support,18 In Hough, streets of Oakland, not to speak of the Mexican, not to ; for example, one~fifth of the nonwhite population was supported by speak of the poor whites that live in the Flatla1Jd areas that . i payments under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Pr~ will be seekJng employment, and that out of a million and I gram (known as AFDC or ADC).19 AFDC is financed jointly by the some eight hundred thousand dollars that the Central t States and the Federal Government. All States have established mone-Labor Council gets from the Federal Government we r:an .. ) tary standards which they regard as the I minimum necessary for a only place 500 people on these jobs among the youth from ! fa~i1y to live in health and decency. In 42 States welfare payments sixteen to twenty~one.18 i fat! to meet the States' own standards.20 .

Mr. Comfort also thought that jobs made available through the anti- I In 1966, the Ohio Department of Public Welfare considered a cash poverty program did not pay a decent salary-U$1.25 an hour, $1.30, ·.1 paymen~ of $224 a month to be necessary to provide a mother and

h t'1 35 thi " l' three children with a minimum standard of health and decency based per apR,(~_.. s year. 'I 28 ,]

j 29

t

,. l' i ,;\ money, I say, because most children need fruit to eat,

fresh frttit, fresh vegetables on 1959 prices. But in 1966 the maximum payment that could be ' made to a family of four under State law was only $170.21 This amount included the maximum rent allowance of $90, a sliding allowance fixed according to the rent actually paid. Evidence at the Cleveland hearing, however, established that this was not enough to obtain decent housing.22

Mrs. Allie Anderson, who received AFDC payments, was asked why she kept trying to find a better apartment. She testified:

1 don't see any sense in paying $80 to $90 a mOl"Jth for four to five rooms and they are in such conditi01z where you have to have a lamp in every room. 'Every time I got ready to wash my face in the face howl, we had to plunge it down. The commode was overflowing all the ltime and so was the ttlh. The tuh was in such conditiol"l SQ you couldn't just tfJash it. You had to wash it two or three times to get it clean.28

Assuming that an AFDC recipient in Cleveland paid a rent no higher than the $90 maximum rent allowance, $80 remained-an amount insufficient to buy food, clothing, soap, school supplies and other items required to support three children .and their mother.

24

The Indiana Public Welfare Department estimated that a mother I

with three children needed $237 a month. But the rnaximum payable to such a family under Indiana law was $126.25

Mrs. Jacqueline Taylor, appearin.g at an open meeting of the Indiana Advisory Committee in Gary, w~w asked to comment on the statement often made that "ADC mothen; have it pretty (:asy." She replied:

I have heard people say it lots of times. T !,Iey think ti.le have it so easy.l would like to see anyone, a:/1.Y01te, to step forward, to change his good job for my pOJition, his 1#ce home, you know, j~st iiis nice position.

In other words, if he ·u;'ants my place, let !'Iim take it for a c'ouple of months. JUj't a couple of months that's all. Let them come forward, Jmell the garbage in the stlmmer­time, fight the rats, freeze in the winter time .•. let him take it, let him try to feed five children from 17 to 5 on $167.00 a month.20

Mrs. Taylor spoke of the: difficulties she had in getting nourishing food for her children with her welfare check:

lis very difficult te; gr.t food for this .small amount of

30

* * * ... the middle class woman, the one that has the htts­band going to wotk every morning . .. she can go to the market and ... get a fresh, fresh head of lettuce, yott ~now, or some fresh frttit and oranges.

•.. when they have to eat the supplement, like I say, these heans and these split peas and these cmznr:d meats, you knoUJ, and this flour and stttff like that, I meart YOtt can only go so long on those. Y Ott have to have vitamins for children to make them very strong hones and good teeth. You can't get it Ottt of beans and peas only and fat­back. They have to have good ptoteins, good nourish-ment, milk.21

Some States, including Indiana and Ohio, participate in the Federal food sta,lnp program undei' which welfare recipients can purchase stamps which in turn can be used to buy food of greater value than the cost of the stamps. In 1966, in Cleveland, $76 worth of food stamps could be used to purchase $120 of food.28 But even the stamps did not provide enough food. For most families, food supplies appeared to last no longer than three weeks after receipt of the benefit check on the 10th of the month.2D

Mrs. Alice Aarons testified that she was unable to feed her family adequately when her month's food supply, purchased with food stamps, ran. out after two or three weeks. She stated that she had to alter her menu and "go back to old basics of potatoes or make biscuits and grits and staples like that that you keep generally." 80 Mrs. Rose Thomas told the Commission in Cleveland that the night before she testified she had fed her family a dinner consisting of rice.&1

When Ivfrs. Carole King, another AFDC mother, was asked if she was able to provide an adequate diet for her children after her food stamps ran out, she responded: "No. . . . even milk which is so es­sential to a child's diet has to go .... Sometimes you can't even afford the [nliik] substitute." 82

Food stamps, moreover, cannot be used for non-food items. An AFDC family in Cleveland is authorized a $5 clothing allowance for

;~'! each child in September, but AFDC mothers testified that this amount ~ -1 is n9t enough to purchase the clothes their chilClren need. ; I Mrs. Evaline McCreary said: ~ t ! I Mostly I go a-round asking people if they know anyhody

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who has clothes to fit my child. This is howl get clothes for my children.s8

Mrs. Kershaw stated that she had been forced to keep a child home i!] from school for lack of shoes: I 1

I have kept one of my daughters out on account of shoes. She is hard on shoes and she didn't have any, so I couldn't send her out in the sno~v without shoes.s4

J,

Asked if she had enough money to meet her children's school ex- I i penses, Mrs. McCreary replied:

No, I don't because my boy don't haUl: no gym clothes to go to school to play gym and last week they put my girl out of school because I didn't have a dollar to buy a birth certificate. . MR. GLICKSTEIN: What does your son do if he doesn't have gym clothes? MRs. MCCREARY: He stands on the sidelines. MR. GLICKSTEIN: The school doesn't provide him with the gym clothes? . MRs. MCCREARY: No, it doesn't.s5

There is no AFDC allowance for school supplies. Mrs. Kershaw was asked by Commissiol).er Hesburgh whether she ! f

was "really condemned to live on less than ... [she] needled] to) Jive on unless ... [sheJ cut corners." Mrs. Kershaw replied: H

I haven't found a way to cut corners. I found a way to live ! without.sa : !

At the Cleveland hearing mothers on AFDC were questioned about ';"1 what happens when food stamps and money run out. The responses " . \ varied: ~.. j ~

:MRS. ALIcE AARONS: Well, you generally let bills go. Like . ,j ! maybe you don't pay all of your light or all of your gas \. 1 bills and there have been cases where you don't pay all of \ 1 your rent either.S7 I '

* * * MRs. CAROLE KING: Well, you usually borrow, but this in some cases causes mothers to have to sneak and do day work or find somebody who is going to help with her children to buy food and different things.s8 . j

Mrs. Friels was asked by the Indiana State Advisory Committee if . I there were ways in which welfare payments could be supplemented. \ { She responded: i ~ I ] 32 i )

r ~

I

W,ell, as I said before, working Of, ••• if you have a boy­frzend. But, no man wa11ts t~ take the responsibility of a whole famtly, you see. He mtght be able to give you some money but n? man wants to take on the responsibility of a whole famtly. So they are very hesitant about it.

It's very hard, I'd say, to find somebody to marry because when you already have a family, most men in this area if they" were (,[Jilting to marry a woman that's on AFDC~ they don't make enough money to take c~re of her them­selves" you understand what I mean, without some kind of asStStance . . . because many' people here make less than $2,000, less than a thousand a -year.S9

Inade~~ate as AFDC payments are, for many families in slum ghettos It 1S the only source of subsistence. The payments, however, in many States are contingent upon the absence of the father from the home. Under this requirement-the so-called "man-in~the-house" rule-the presence of a man in the home disqualifies a family from ~e AFJ?C pr~fram unless he is the father and is physically or mentally l!1capacItated. At the Cleveland hearing Mrs. King, a mother on wel­fare, was asked if the program did not induce the father to leave the home. ~he replied:

Su~e, b,ecause a man doesn't want to feel that he is gomg to ta~e bread out of his child's mouth if he is really a man" Thts means that Ite leaves. If he is not able to sup­port his family adequately, he usually leaves.~l. . ..

M~s. Willa Johnson, Supervisory Caseworker for the Lake County (Ind~:u;a) Department .of P~blic Weifare, stated at the State Advisory Con;u:nlttee open meetmg m Gary that "many fathers desert'their fa1i.l1hes ra!:her than see them suffer from inability to provide their basic needs." 42 Mrs. M"Creary testified in Cleveland:

T hiis is how me and my husband got separated when he got out of his job and he went to relief to get h~lp and they refused to help ... this is one reason we separated and dttJorced. He ~ouldn't se~hii~,~id~ go hungry so he just left. He couldn t afford four, so h~ Just left.4s

In Newark, a for~er ca~~worket for the Newark-Essex County Welfare Board stated that the welfare system in this State forces the father out of the home and keeps the father out of the home· "44 H 'd th . th . : . . e Sal at m e case of a man recently returned from pnson who could not find employment:

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It was my very sad duty to have to tell him that tl he re­mained in the home . • . the family would be taken off [AFDC] and) off the record) I informally suggested to him that it might be better if he left the home in order for his family to be taken care of.~5 .

Rev. Walter Grevatt, Jr., a minister in the Hough area, told the Com­mission in Cleveland:

] find it very difficult when I talk to a man who is out of work who has been trying very hard to get work and who says to me, II] think I am going to leave ~y family so that they can get on ADC." I find it very difficult to advise him not to because t't is life and death that we are talking about. It is hunger and some of our people are hungry for a day before they will come to the church and ask as a last ditch desperate attempt to get some help for food.46

! Mrs. Taylor drew the following picture of an AFDC mother strug- !

gling to raise childrehn in Gary on her welfare payments "without 1,\ I a husb?.I~g or a man to elp": , ;

Utbad enough to try to raise them, just one person) ! 1 just raising five children when she has to buck all kinds of ! 1

diffiou'tttes to try to make ends almost touch because they c j won't meet •.. give them inspt'ration plus trying to :" i keep your morale up and try to. look forward to the f't future, it's very hard. In fact if you try it too long and if ,i J you are not a very strong person, you will come out in the II dingb~twar~, thai s all.·? ;1

The AFDC program not only fails to "maintain and strengthen i I family life," 48 but often its administrative rules and procedures thwart (, 1 efforts by recipients to become financially independent. Many mothers i I seek to supplement welfare payments by working. AFDC mothers in ! ,

Cleveland testified, however, that relief checks for AFDC recipients who worked were stopped or reduced.49 Thus, many women were prevented from supplementing their AFDC payments, even to the ' exten, of earning enough to meet the State's own minimum health and decency standard.~o ,

Mrs. Pearl McCallum, a welfare recipient in Boston, said that after! enrolling in a Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) :1 training program the amount of her welfare check was reduced, i !i whereupon she "lost all benefits," including medical benefits for her i .j children.G1 L~

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Mrs. Charlotte Gordon, rece~ving welfare payments in Gary, stated that she had attempted to obtam employment but found that "a s n

k' £ b . soo as ~ou go to wor ,m ,act efore you have work~a~ your probationary perIOd out, the first thmg that the welfare does is cuts your check " 52

This procedure puzzled her: .

Before I drew the /irst check they had automatically cut my [weltare] check. Yet they want . . . [welfare recipi­ents] to tmprove themselves. If they are going to take the money from you before you can help yourself) how are you gOtng to be able to do it? ~8

. The AFJ?? mo~ers ~ho testified in Cleveland stated that many welfare reCIpIents sneak and do day work in order not to h th· AF~C checks redu~ed.54 All of the mothers testified that a;vene~ chOIce, they would like to work to supplement their AFDC checks. 55

Some ;;relfare programs offer training to help recipients become self-suffiCIent. In Gary and Boston, welfare mothers complained that the.courses offered women receiving AFDC payments were essentially deSIgned to develop "polite domestics": 56

They don't gi~e you the courses with any dignlty. The courses theJ! gtve you on the welfare [are for] basic things that these l!egro pe~ple hape done all the time, cooking, housekeeptng, washtng and things of that sort.~?

Mrs. Dorcas Lenoir of Gary took a homemaker aid course given to welfare mothers. She commented:

It seems rather unnecessary for a Negro to go to school to get a certificate to clean up someone else's house • •.• 58

~n order for welfare mothers to work, day care centers for their children ar,e need~d. Asked what problems a welfare mother in Cleve­land-faced m seekmg employment, Mrs. King replied!

{H]oUl are you ¥ot'ng to look for a job' when you-can't afford a baby sttter andc you can't leave the children alone? 59

m M:s, Th~ma~ described the failure of efforts of the Glenville Com-

fUlllty :anton m Cleveland to·establish a day care center for children

o workmg mothers:

We tried to open a day care center over in Glenville and we were met with lots of red tape . . . it ht«i to be a one-story building. There are a lot of things that you really have t~ go through and unless you hatJe money or some­one wtth money to back you, you can't really do it.oo

35

Domestic Wark ~'\. ~l \~ j~

Many women who live in slum ghettboshw0odrk O~sIdocmlesticls idn

ththe ;:'I"'~" .. ~.,:

homes of white persons in other neigh or 0 s. n eve an, e ~ Commission heard Mrs. Geraldine Roberts describe their condition. 1 '1

Mrs. Roberts-herself a domestic worker since the age of eight 62_ 'oj

had attempted to organize domestics in Cleveland. She testified that 1 Negro women become domestic workers for various reasons, includ- : 1 ing lack of training for other types of work and discrimination against i ~ Negroes who migrate to the city and cannot find other employment l ! even though they may be qualified. In addition" she said: "Some people i 1 just don't like to get welfare so they rather take a chance trying to ! work even though they know it's not much security." os She suggested , . . 1 that since domestic workers are not covered by mmunum wage aws, employers pay them as little as pos::ible.

Mrs. Roberts estimated that the average domestic worker's salary in Cleveland was $35-$40 per week, but she added that it was quite normal for women to work for $25. Asked how many hours a week this work involved, she replied:

Sometimes you just stay until you are told to go , i

home • ... UsUally, they ask for five days or five and a i I half days.64 . !

She said that at the end of the month, when her rent is paid, she : ! "sometimes [h~s] no more than a couple of dollars left." 05 ; I

The low pay is accompanied by lack of even the most elementary ; I security. Many domestic workers don't pay Social Security "becau~e i l the pay is so low." They receive no sick or vacation pay, and have di£- II ficulty obtaining credit.60 I \

Domestic workers meet large obst3.cles in trying to improve their i \ condition. Efforts to organize meet employer resistance; Mrs. Roberts ; testified that she was fired when she attempted to unionize other workers and many fear the same fate. Individual efforts such as at­tending night school after work also are difficult to sustain:

them artmcially high prices for inferior housing. Mrs. Velma Woods, the second Negro to move into the Clevelander, an apartment build~ ing in Hough, testified that when she moved in she paid $104 a month for three and a half rooms. This was more rent, she stated, than white tenants were paying for apartm~nts of the same size:

Well, the u'hite neighbors had been living there 25 or 30 years, an~ they didn't want to move and they said they never patd over $60 a month for no apprtment in there. The largest apartment was renting for ~'60 a month. He said, "You colored people should get together and do something about it." At that time Cleveland was over­cr.o(uded and there was nowhere for colored people to lwe. A lot of people wanted a decent place to live.68

Because they lack ready cash, slum residents often are forced to seek cr~dit at exorbitant rates in order to purchase necessary items. Several WItnesses confirmed the statement of a Negro pastor in New~ ark that people in the ghetto

• . . a:e exploited by the merchants • . . . They cannot pay n.ght out because they do not have the monies in circulation. So, therefore, they have to pay on time. And because of this, they pay double for items.69

Similarly, Mrs. Friels told the Indiana State Advisory Committee tha~ because welfare mothers in Gary cannot get credit from large cham stores to purc~ase such necessary items as a gas heater, they gen­erally have to patroillze small furniture stores which "charge you twice the thing they cost." 70 And Mrs. Lenoir said:

Just last night I went to price a used refrigerator at the store~ right in this area that witllet welfare people have credtt. And there was one particular store that had a re­frigerator, 1~160 credit, $129 cash. $18 ... down payment, $12 a month for 18 months plus $35 carrying charge, if you would get it on credit [you would pay] double the amount that it's really supposed to cost.7l

Often, we attempt night school but then if the e~ployer asks a domestic worker to stay late even though tt mtght be a class night, they have no choice but to stay . ... 67

;; Exploitation assum~s other forms. Welfare mothers in Cleveland and' I Gary said that merchants raised prices when welfare checks were is- .

:, sued, Mrs. Ella Kershaw in Cleveland stated that prices usually drop Exploitation t near the end of the month when the welfare money has been spent.72

Residents of slum ghettos often are exploited as a result of their race { ~rs. King told the Commission that stores usually run sales at the and poverty. For example, because racial discrimination limits the .~ tune of the month when the welfare money has been exhausted and

I dl d dd ch e j dth I supply of housing available to Negroes, an or s can an 0 arg ~f suspen e sa es on the day the welfare (;heck~ come due~7a t,::-"t

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Business ani/, Property

Economic conditions in the slums make it difficult to own or main­tain property. Mrs. Genevieve Jefferson testified that after her neigh­borhood in San Francisco had shifted from white to predominantly Negro, her neighbor

... came over quite upset one day. Her insurance had been cancelled . ... [T]he man who had handled her insurance . .. was very apologetic and in order to ex­plain the reason . . . for this he enclosed a little note from the-I don't know whether it was a broker or an in­surance company or who-with whom he had placed the insurance, and the gist of it was that "[w]e don't want to insure in that neighborhood any longer. Frankly, we don't want their business." That was the line I still remember. . . . 14

Similarly, many insurance companies will not insure businesses in slum areas.75 Lack of insurance depresses property maintenance and business investments.

The owner of the Alhambra apartment house in Cleveland testified that obtaining insurance was one of his major problems in operating the building.76 Testifying before the 1966 riot in Cleveland's Hough area, Mr. Thorington described his problems in attempting to insure his grocery store in Hough:

My first year in business, I obtained insurance at a reason­able rate. At the end of the year, ] was notified without any reason whatsoever that they were canceling it, they just said they weren't carrying insurance in that area {.my more. No prior notice . ... ] shopped around and] found out it is no longer a case of shopping around for insurance companies, it is a case of an insurance compctny who will accept you. Burglary insurance, window insur­ance, this type of thing is practically impossible to get unless you have been there for a long period of time and you had it and kept it. But obtaining it now is practically impossible .11

Obtaining insurance is not the only problem of the small business­man in a slum area. Mr. Thorington described the credit problems of a small businessman in Hough:

[T]he primary problem is always financing. Every bus­iness, particularly a small business, a Negro business in a

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deteriorated area, runs into financial problems at one time or another and it is necessary to obtain a quick smallloan.'18

Loans through Federal programs take too long to be processed according to Mr. Thorington: '

I think the need is for a type of agency where a merchant a businessman, can go the same as he would go to a bank or loan company and get a loan within a week or ten days because it a business is hurting enough that he needs a loan and it t~kes three or four or five months to get that loan, by ,the tzme the loan comes through, he is either dead or zt doesn't matter any more.19

B:c~use Mr. Thorington's store is located in a slum, he has difficulty obtammg credIt although he, in turn, must extend credit to his customers, He testified:

~redit tor any merchant in an area of this kind is essen­tzal. It ts not only essential, it is almost the backbone of it. Because most of the people in the area are living on ADC checks, welfare chec~s, ?ld age checks, construction work, seasonal work. Thezr mcome comes in at certain fixed periods.so

Mr. Thorington testified that three out of five customers do pay their bills but with the other two, "you are stuck":

It is a hard thing with credit because here is a person who has been doing business with you right along. They always come up, they always pay you and one day they come up and say: "] am a dollar short. I need some food. Can you let me have it?" You got to go along with them.

They, come in ~he next day and say: "That check I was lookmg for dzdn't come. Could you give me another dollar?" Finally you wind up, you've got a bill for about $10 and they pay it .

The ne7t month they will come in and the same story, they wzll run up to $15. They pay it. So you say, this guy's pretty good, he'll pay me. So you open the door and say: "Okay. Well, when you need something, come on in." He runs up a bill of $30. The day his check comes in, the d~y he ,usually fays you, you look for him. You don't see

.. htm. Ftnalll hts friends come in. ((Hey, you know Bob moved-he s g~n..e.11 There you are, you're stuck. No recourse. That 2S your problem with credit there.s1

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39

. .. G dlett owner of a Negro newspaper, was In San Franclsco,.Dr. d ~ , wth of Negro businesses:

asked what factors unpe e e gro b . . . h . ther forms of ust-Well, Negro business w t e maw, ~ 0 d most

o. ca ital and experzencc 0 • • an ness, requz~e P Ii st generation businesses and, Negro bus~nesses ar;om' etitive city, such as San Fran­moreover.) In a very. p 0 h 'ch Negroes engage, cisco traditional busznesses In W Z r d by

h' cafes barber shops, etcetera are ,"!onopo zzeZ suc as, afe in the maw caters on y to

other groups, and a Negro c clientele you in the main N e roes If you cater to a poor ',. 82

wilt conduct a very poor and insecure busznesso

o 0 • they want in on the American dream that they see on their broken down TV screens ,On living rooms with a sofa that is half broken down.!

Past generations of Americans have escaped trom the economic insecurity and meanness of ghetto life by bettering their economic circumstances, obtaining for themselves or their children a good edu­cation, and moving outside the ghetto. For many reasons, these avenues are closed to most Negroes.

The Role of the Ghetto School

One of the most significant barriers impeding progress in oppor­tunity for Negroes is the ghetto school, which has provided inadequate education for Negroes and has failed to equip Negroes with the skills needed for competition in the job market.2

Negroes are less likely to finish public school than whites and they arl~ much more likely to attend schools with high dropout rates. In Cleveland, John Stafford, principal of the almost all-Negro Glenville High School, testified that almost 30 percent of his students dropped out of school between 10th grade and graduation.s

As early as the third grade, the average Negro student in the United States is one year behind the average white student in verbal achieve­ment. And by the 12th grade, the average Negro student is nearly three years behind the average white student.'

John Solar, Executive Director of the Harlem Neighborhood Asso­ciation and a resident of Harlem, told the New York State Advisory Committee:

[N]ow it really isn't . •. necessary to say to a person) I am sorry, you can)t have the job because you are Negro. What happens more frequently now is that they say, you

277-0170-67--4 41

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can't have the job because you are not properly educated, you are not motivated, you are not prepared.

This is quite damning, because you see how this prejudice has operated for so long that 120W it's 120 longer 12ecessary to say, I dotl't want you because you are black. I do12't want you because you are just 120t pre~ pared, and it has bee12 an educational system that has worked to create this conditio12.5

Parents and teachers who testified at Commission hearings and par~ ticipated in Advisory Committee meetings expressed concern over the quality of education in slum ghetto schools. In Boston, Negro parents commented on the overcrowded and poor physical condition of many of the schools, and their lack of facilities. Mrs. Betty Johnson told the Massachusetts Advisory Committee: "In the old [Roxbury] schools children were crowded by as many as 45 in a classroom, with class~ rooms in the basement and in the auditorium. The teachers said it was very difficult to teach 45 children." 6

Donald E. Snead, chairman of a parents group, agreed with this

observation: I first 120ticed that the schools i12 Roxbury weren't ade~ quate whe12 I visited the school which my nine year old son was attending. There were 40 to 47 children in a classroom and I wondered how anyone teacher could ef~ fectively teach such a large group."

In Cleveland, Mrs. Percy Cunningham, a science teacher at a pre~ dominantly Negro school in the Hough ghetto, compared the school to the segregated Southern schools in which she had taught. The facilities in Cleveland were worse, she said:

[In Georgia] there were adequate supplies ... for the children to work with . ... [W]here I now work I teach ',' . general science and I haven't yet used a miC'ro~ scope . ... [L]ook at 2100 children in a building with one or two microscopes available.

s

Mrs. Hattie Collins, who lives in Hough~ was asked if she believed her children were receiving a better education than she had received in Alabama. She felt that ·"they are getting better speech but not a better edu~ation." 9 She commented that although she had gone to school more than 30 years ago she used the same textbooks as her children were curreritly using in the all~Negro elementary school they

attended:

42

J: , , , I haY;' gO,ne to ,chool 3,,0 years ago in the first grade I and I had Altce and Jerry. Maybe this is a new eJt· .. · 'I! b t 't t'll ((AI' u. ~ton, L~1 u t s t says ~ce and Jerry". This is the textbook I l':'1 had when I was gotng to school, ((Alice a11d Jerry".lO

\;'\ In addition, Mrs. Collins testified that the life illustrated' "AI' I ,[ d J " '1 m Ice I ,I an erry wasrrre evanttoherchildren:

The lite th~t is shown in ((Alice and Jerry" this is tor the suburb chtldren, the beach, the playgrounds ' h W d 'h ' arcus, ,arses., e ~n t ave anything in this book concerning tnner cIty chIldren. If they didn't see the police with a horse they .wouldn't know (vhat it was and the teachers are all whtte and everything. So they don't k h' b now any~ t tng ,a out the suburbs. They are reading something oppostte from their edtlcation.ll

At ~e oP7n meeting of the Commission's California State Advisory CommIttee m Los Angeles, Rosalinda Mendez a Mexican Am ' high school senior, said: ' encan

We are taught about our great American heritage, about ~emocracy, f~eedom, equal opportunity for all, and yet tn th~ very hutory and geography books, all we ever see ~re pt,cture: of Anglo kids, a blond world that we cannot tdenttfy wtth or associate with.

We look fo; others like ourselves in these history books, for someth~ng to be proud of for being a Mexican, and all We see tn books, magazines, films and TV shows are stereot~pes of a dark, dirty, smelly man with a tequilla bottle tn one hand" a dripping taco in the other, a serape wrapped at'ound htm, and a big sombrero on his head.l2

thJohn Callahan, assistant principal of a school in Roxbury testified £ at 70 perce~t of the teachers in his particular dist:rict-co~posed of ~ur ,Predommantly Negro elementary schools-were "nontenure"

at IS, they had less_than three years experience in the Boston sch~l system. J:Ie ~lso. te~tified that there was a very high ~ate of teacher turnover In his dIstrIct:

In my 16 yea1'S there I have seen many teachers transfer out of the Dearborn School to less difficult districts. I have ~ever seen another teacher transfer from another district mto the Dearborn School.

43

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! I:

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In my 16 years I have seen four principals tran1er out of the Dearborn School to less difficult school!. I am now working under my sixth principal.

When these teachers who do transfer from the Dear~ b~r~ School, these teachers of some experience, ~o ~ess difficult schools, they are usually replaced ~y begznnmg or recently appointed teachers. I thmk th:s had led to problems, many problems, in the school.

18

Parents who testified described how they were made .aware of tl;.e difference in the quality of education offered ~t pr~dommantly white and predominantly Negro schools when the~ .chlldren transf:rred. In Rochester, Rev. Arthur L. Whitaker, a I11lfilster and an a~slsta~t professor at the University of Rochester, compared t!le educatlOn ,hiS two sons received in predominantly Negro schools With tlle educatlOn they received in predominantly white schools:

They were the first two Negro pupi~s to enter No. 16 School, and while there was no socral problem at all involved, it was quite clear that our oldest boy was deficient itz the are{(. of English at the point of not under~ standing the break-down of uJords in terms of syllable~. At his particular fifth grade level he had not, had thts whereas the children at the fifth grade level m No. 16 School had had this, so this was a real diffic~lty for him" and we had to work especially hard with hzm along th:s

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In B:~: Charles Jiggetts stated that although his daughter's grades II had been all A's in predominantly Negro schools, w~len she entered I I

Girls Latin School (predominantly white) she had difficulty: i ) Now if a child is an A student in one school she should I ! be an A student when she goes to another school, but I ! when she got her first report card from Girls Latin School ' I it was evident that she was sadly lacking. So what do all ! those A's mean? If she had received A's for six years w,hy I ! can't she get A's or even B's now? Nobody should thtnk" II that an A student in a Roxbury or Dorchester school; 1~1 means anything.

15 I 'J Witnesses testified that the standards set both by students and. faculty l it

in slum ghetto schools have a negative effect 011 student motivatlOn and !;~ achievement. David Jaquith, Presi?e~t of the, Syracuse, Board. of 1~1 Education, explained at the COmmlSSlOn'S Rochester hearing why a l~~

l~l

I

group of Negro students from disadvantaged backgrounds did better when they were transferred to a school whose student body was com~ posed mainly of advantaged white students:

..• [a]t Madison Junior High School [predominantly N~gro] if you cooperated with the teacher and did your homew01~k, you wt.-re a ttko()k/'

At Levy Junior High School [predominantly white] if you don't cooperate with the teacher and don't do your homework, you are a It kook:' 16

. Norman Gross, who taught at the predominantly Negro Madison High School in Rochester described the difference in student aspira~ cion between Madison and Brighton, a suburban high school. After tan exchange program in which Madison students visited Brighton:

[O]ne of the Madison youngsters said: ItAt Madison we asked a question, are you going to college? At Brighton the question is always what college are you going to?" 1,(

D.t:. Charles Pinderhughes, a psychiatrist; explabed in Boston that children learn rrom each other by means of a "hidden curriculum":

[W]hat the pupils are learning from one another is prob~ ably just as important as what they are leal'ning from the teachers. This is what I refer to as the hidden cur­riculum. It involves such things as how to think about themselves, how to think about other people, and how to get along with them. It involves such things as values, . . . codes, and . . . styles of behavior. . . /8

John Stafford testified that:

[TJhe peer influence in a segregated community is very strong, and there are times for example where you must commit yourself with the peers even though really you would not do this if you were in a more rational situation/9

Recently, the Commission conducted a special study of the effects of the confinement of Negro pupils to schools attended largely by members of their own ra~~. The study confirmed the testimony of the witnesses that students who attend school with less advantaged students do hot do as well as students of similar background who attend school Witll more advantaged students.20

Many witnesses also testified that predominantly Negro schools

45

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were stigmatized by the communjty, ~nd ili~t this stigma a~ected the attitudes of students and teachers and itp.palred student achIevement.

Dr. Pinderhughes testified at the Commission's Bosto~ hearing that "the Negro school ... carries with it a stigma that mfluences the attitudes both on the part of outsiders and on the part of parents, students and teachers associated with the school." 21 Dr. James Allen, Commissioner of Education for the State of New York, sta~ed at the Rochester hearing that "the all Negro schools ... are lOOked upon by the community as being poor schools .... No matte: what you do to try to make them better, in the minds of JPost whIte people . . .

h 1 " 22 these are poor sc 00 s. Charles Bohi, who taught at Glenville High School, told th~ Com~

mission about the school's poor reputation in the CO~mU?lty. He testified that when he moved to Cleveland people would mqUlre about

his occupation: [!Just to make conversation 1 would tell a clerk at one of tlte department storeslteach at Glenville and they would say, "Oh,.olt, you are headed for trouble." I WQuld tell my friends that I. teach at Glenville. and :hey. w.oul~, say, ((Boy, you have really got yourse'f tn for zt th~s tzme, and I would feel that this attitude is comm,unzcated to the students by incidents that are reported tn the press and so on where they themselves have come to accept the fact that Glenville is, indeed, an inferior high school.

23

The students are aware of the reputation of Negro ghetto sch~ols in the larger community. Carrie McCall, graduate,of an all-~egro hIgh school in Cleveland, was asked about her school s reputatlOn:

46

Well I believe it has an image that all we can do is be prett; good in sports, that is basketball and tra~k, but they feel that is about all) we have, a. b~~ch .of thzeves, a bunch of cutthroats there that are1: t wzll.tn~ to learn any­thing . ... [A]t one time we had thzs bus tnctdent and they stole a bus and the next day 01t the front of the paper they had ((East Tech Steals School Bus," which I thought was rather ridiculous, a school as large as East Tech walking off with a bus . •. but they played this ~p for several days in the paper until they found out that !t was a dropout from another scho?l and oUt' school dzd n~t get a public apology for thzs damage to our school s

name.24

.) Norman Gross described a similar incident in Rochester:

[W]e had an undefeated football team, a team that was undefeated for some two years in a 1'OW, and yet the item by a well meaning sports reporter came out, NBlack Board Jungle Breeds Champs." Our kids are really hurt by their low self esteem as a result of the stigma here at Madison.25

Mr. Bohi testified that the students at Glenville not only thought their school inferior but had "come to accept the fact that because $ey are in this inferior high school they are inferior .... " 26 Asked about the value of a student exchange between Glenville and an all­white suburban high school, Mr. Bohi replied:

... 1 think the reaction is somewhat illuminating as one of my students in one of my classes said last year, If Well it was nice of them to come down to the zoo to see us." 27

When Miss McCall was asked how the reputation of her high school affected the attitudes of the students, she replied:

Well, I think they say one thing you have against you, you are a Negro and the second thing when you go to apply for a job, the second thing is that you went. to East Tech. The students feel what is the use for me to try to accomplish something. When 1 get out, I am not going to be able to get a job anyway.28

She also was asked if the school's reputation had an effect on the teachers:

Well, they have come to th~ school with the attitude these are a bunch of Negrot'~s that don't want to learn so why should I want to put my best foot forward to try to teach them anything that would better them in life.29

Dr. F'inderhughes traced the stigma involved in attending a pre­dominantly Negro school to slavery. The Commission's General Coun~ sel asked Dr. Pinderhughes: "[I]t is generally believed that most ethnic and religious groups have not been disadvantaged by being segregated in schools. Is it different for Negroes?" ~o Dr. Pinderhughes replied that there was "a vast difference". The system of slavery in this coun­try, he testified, assigned certain functions to Negroes which were designed to keep them powerless, exploited and in an inferior position to whites.

According to Dr. Pinderhughes, since Negroes have been much more limited in their mobility than other groups because of racial.

47

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discrimination, "there has been little opportunity for diffusion of the basic elements in their old roles. The lack. of diffusion in these roles has maintained certain characteristics that might be thought of as I.

remnants of a slave culture caste, which still prevail." 3l

In the view of Dr. Pinderhughes, the racially isolated school, instead of acting as an agent through which Negroes can. n:ove f~eely in American society, is partly responsible for transmlttmg this slave psychology:

[T]he school is one of the major participants in th~ transfer of culture to young people. Where we have p1't~ marily a single ethnic group in a school,'the school serves as a vehicle for conveying tile characteristics of that group. So a school in an Irish community wil~ perpetu~te and help to produce It-ish youngsters; and zn a Jewtsh community, Jewish youngsters; and in a Negro com~ mutJity, the same unfavorable stamp w.hich ~ ,have described, will be pressed, or theschool wtll parttctpate, at least, in the transmission of it.52

Students and parents told the Commission tllat the a~titudes ~en~ erate:d in slum ghetto schools were reflected in the counselmg pr~ctices of teachers and guidance counselors.1virs. Gladys Guson, a parent ~n the South End area of Boston, stated that "the attitude of the teachers m the South End schools is demoralizing to the Negro students. The young~ sters are discouraged from applying for scholarships." 55 Mrs. Pearl Lee in Boston said that her son who aspired to be an engineer was told by the guidance counselor: "You shouldn't go into engineering because it is hard fot your people to get jobs. . .. " According to Mrs. Lee: "Many guidance . counselors tell the youngsters, 'Why study? Take up a trade.''' 34 , .

Rev. Arthur Whitaker, testifying in Rochester, told the CommISSIOn that in ghetto schools in that city

. . . some yoteng women . . . received negative cou~sel~ ing at the point of having it suggested :hat they g,o znto practi6q.t"1)ursing rather than becomzng a regtstered nurse.55

In its study, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools, the Commission (~oncluded that Negro students in ghetto schools a~e da~aged by the effect which racial isolation itself has upon ~elr ac.hl~vem~nt, attitudes and aspirations. The source of the harm whIc~ racIal.Iso~atlon in\flicts upon Negro children, the Commission det~rmmed, l~es m ~e k .

attitudes which such isolation generates; Negro chIldren beheve thelf .. I .

48

schools are stigmatized and regarded as inferior by the community a belief often shared by their parents and teachers.36 The damage ~o students attending racially isolated schools, the Commission found, is reflected in fewer job opportunities and lower paying jobs.57

Economic Opportunity

As previously noted, most unskilled jobs no longer provide a route up the economic ladder. Opportunity for advancement therefore depends on possessing the training needed for, and having access to, skilled jobs. When Negro students finish school or drop out, they face problems of entering, often with limited skills, a job market where discrimination still persists and where jobs increasingly are becoming inaccessible to slum residents.

Job Training Programs. The Federal Government has attempted ro meet the problem of limited skills by a variety of training programs. Its principal effort has been through programs funded under the Man~ power Development and Training Act (MDTA).38 The purpose of MDT A is to promote the development of job training programs for persons who cannot reasonably be expected to obtain full~time em~ ployment without such training. The program seeks to equip trainees with new and improved skills in shortage occupations.39

In Cleveland, the Commission heard complaints that MDTA train~ ees were being taught skills in which there were no shortages; that the length of training was unrealistically short, and that the equip­ment was inadequate.

Willie Whitsitt, a young Negro who had dropped out of high school to help support his family; testified that he had held various jobs m restaurants, earning as little as $1.2~ an hour, .~hen he decided to enroll in an MDTA stockroom training course. Mr. Whitsitt testified that he completed the course and earned a certificate, but that shortly before the end of the c-ourse while he was receiving on~the~job training, his supervisor, who needed someone to run a stockroom, indicated that Mr. Whitsitt had not had enough training or experience to be hired.40

Mr. Whitsitt also testified that although the instructor had stated there was a good possibility that everyone who finished the course would be placed in a stockroom job, the State Employment Service was unable to refer him to any stockroom clerk jobs. He testified that since completing the course he had held "a couple of jobs as cook in a restaurant"-the same kind of job he had had before he took the course.41

49

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Similarly, Mrs. Clara Harris, who had pm-t~cipated in MDTA train- I

ing, told the New York State Advisory Commlttee: ,

When you go to the State Employment Agency, no jobs. You are not qualified to get jobs, they tell you.

' . .i

* * * You go to the State, they don't have jobs for you.

So w; are bei1Jg trained for the unemployed. We ar~ ~n­employed before we come into the Manpower Trammg School and believe me, we are ready for the unemploy­ment line when we come out.

42

John Frieson who completed an electric motor repair course funded by MDTA, w;s asked at the Cleveland hearing why. only 16 people out of 25 who started the course actually completed It:

Well, some of them lost heart because ~he school, didn't have equipment. There was lack at wzre a~d dtfferent things and then some of them qUtt on thezr own, you know, but most of the,m quit ~ecause they los~aheart. They didn't have the rtght equtpment fat' them.

Mr. Frieson also thought that the course suffered from an unrealistic

timetable: •• • J didn't know anything about a motor until I started with that class. The teacher had to start us from th,e bot­tom and work our way up . ... With the time bemg so short and with the lack of equipment, we failed.

44

Mr, Frieson testified that the necessary equipment never ~ame an~ the students had to depend on the few motors brought In by th

instructor. .. . B d Similarly, Mrs. Pearl McCallum, a welfare reClpl~nt m. oston, e-

scribed the MDT A clerk-steno training program m whlch she had been enrolled:

Twenty stude11ts started this course but there were only 11 typewriters available. We were told that funds were not allocated .4G

Responsibility for implementation of the MDT A prog~an: i~ Cleve­land is so diffuse that it is difficult to determine ~hose Job l~ lS to s~~ that courses are properly equipped and of sufficlent duratlOn to

valuable. . E I t Serv Emden Schulz, Area Manager of the ?l~? State . ~p oymen -

ice, testified in Cleveland that his office mltlates trammg proposals on

50

the basis of which the public school system formulates its curriculum and budget!6 Commission members inquired of Fred Taylor, MOTA Coordinator at the Cleveland Area level, b,ow a person who was par­ticipating in a course would file a complaint alleging deficiencies in the course; Mr. Taylor suggested that a complaint could be addressed to the school or to the Ohio State Employment Service.4T

Mr. Schulz stated that if a complaint were directed to the Ohio State Employment Service, he would

. . . sit down with the school officials and go over the complaints that we have received. But, in effect, we are powerless to tell the school people what they should or could do to improve, other than to make suggestions of what we think should be done.48

Mr. Schulz felt that his office lacked power to stop payments to the school system and that although his office might have a "moral responsibility" the law did not permit it to serve as a "watchdog." Asked if he considered it part of his responsibility to find out if a course was being conducted adequately, 1vf.J. Taylor replied:

It is not a matter of what J regard it to be. The law is not set up providing or stipulating that we should have such responsibility.49

Mrs. Clara Harris told the Commission's New York State Advisory Committee about her experience with MDT A in New York City:

The trainees in the schools are not getting the training in these schools and J get sick when you see these people sit up here from the Board of Education. You go to your principal in the school and you say. ((Why am J not getting math?" I(DonJt ask meJ it's the State.'J The State, ((Don't ask me, it's the Board of Education." This is what the

• I!O traznees get. . '

Persons working with unemployed Negroes criticized MDT A for other'reasons. One criticism 'was that the program was not reaching the hard-core unemployed. Martin Gopen: a counselor with the Youth Opporttinitie~ Center, tol~\ the Massachusetts State Advisory Com-mittee that 'MDT A ' .

. . . does not serve the population it was intended to serve , since entrance requirements frequently eliminate hard·

core unemployed. Training for such jobs as medical lab assistant and lens grinder now require a high school diploma.1S1 ' ,

51

Charles Jiggetts, Industrial Training Advisor with the Boston Office 1 among the 1,786 journeymen ironworkers; 01. and only one of the iron-of the Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training-an agency of the j' workers' ~pprentices w~s Negro.:: There was a single Negro among United States Department of Labor-agreed and cited other limita-·,f the 1,519 Journeymen plpefitters; all of the pipefitters' 80 apprentices tions of the program: '; were white.64

We are spending milliotlS of dollars for all kbinds offitr~in- I·, ...... :,. ... :',··. Isn OaklF

and.' wherehthe RORulabtion isS about 36 percent nonwhite, and ing programs but the people who should e bene tmg "', man. ranc1sc~, W ere ~t 1S a out 2 percent,6C1 it was not possible from them are not in the programs. There are hidden r' r to obram exa~t mformation on the number of m~nority workers in barriers such as age limitations, wage limitations, aca- ~~ each craft Ur:1O~.66. ~egr?membership in Local 3, Operating Engi-demic requirements, etc., so that the people who really ~·.ti.:.; neers, whose JunsdlctlOn mcludes the Bay Area, has been estimated at need this kind of training and may eve1J have the poten- "/ 30 Negro members out of 9,000.67 Of the 3,000 members in the Plumb-tial, can't get in because they can)t meet these require- !I eis Union Local 38, which also operates in the Bay Area, 20 were ments.52 II Negroes.68

Another criticism made by witnesses was that even the people who 1 J David F. Major, a Negro painting contractor, drew a similar picture are able to participate in MDT A training do not have meaningful jobs I of the situation in Boston:

when they complete training. I In 1960, there were 1;297 apprentices in the building James Solar, Executive Director of the Harlem Neighborhood i f trades in Massachusetts and only 15 were Negro. In 1965

Association, told the Commission's New York State Advisory Com· t j there were 2)680 apprentices and still only 15 were mittee that people going through the training programs were getting 'I Negroes.] know of many Negroes who have tried to join into "menial jobs, secondary jobs •. , .. " 63 Rev. Paul Younger in Cleve. i unt'tms hut have been refused ..•• land spoke of the disillusionment of the Negro community with job f Because the construction labor force is smaller than training programs because they do not lead to better jobs, Negroes in i needed here. they have to fill vacancies with men im-the community, he said, "have gotten so they don't believe you when "I d t

,. 'th 1" 54 ! ! porte rom other States. In all tht's the Negro is left out. yousaytrammg1s eway to emp oyment. ( The local unions are almost all-white and the imported

Exclusionary Union Practices, A route which in the past has led I, ! 1 b I a or is all-white. So the Negro is either left unemployed to wel1~paid employment for young men with limited formal educa- J

tion is apprenticeship in the building and construction trades. Even t f . orUI1dere~ployed ... • 60 •

though job openings in skilled construction trades constitute only a 11 :1 ~thou~h ,umon !e.aders ~emed that their unions discriwinated in fraction of the jobs needed to eliminate current mass unemployment I:J ~el[ adm1sslOn P?liC1eS, Uluon witnesses in Cleveland and San Fran~ in Negro communities, they nevertheless represen.t substantial em- '/· ..... ,· ..•. 1 CISCO ope?ly adml~ted the practice of nepotism, under which friends ployment opportunities,lia Although many Negroes are employed as 'i and rela~lves of umon members, almost all of whom were white, were laborers on construction jobs, the better paying jobs in categories stich 1,1 favor~d m, selecting applicants for union membership and union ap­as plumbers, electricians and operating engineers have not been open Ul prent~cesh~p progr~s.'10 Martin Kilbane, Chairman of the Joint Ap­to them.66 A Negro youth such as the one in Boston who was told by t;~ pre~?ceshlp ?omlI1J.ttee of the Plumbers Local of Cleveland, testified his high school guidance counselor to "take up a trade," S7 may attempt j;1 that [t]here 1~ a tendency for us to take(:are of our own •.•. " n Joseph to follow this advice only to End the traditional route-apprenticeship llitl Mazz?la, Busm:ss Manager of the Plumbers Union Local 38 in San training-blocked. l;t Franc1sco, explamed why 50 percent of the journeymen in his union

In 1966, the p()pulation of Cleveland was roughly' 34 percent I'~ were sons of union men:

Negro.5s

Plumbers Union ~ocal S~ in Clevelan~ had four Negro mem- b~t It is just that the 5~ percent had a ben'er privi.lege . ~ ,. bers out of a tot~ of ~,428 hcensed J~urn~ymen. The first Ne~ro mem-I;! every f~her.wants hts son to he pretty mtrc~ what he was. bers were admItted m 1964 after plcketmg of a federally aSSisted con-I..:'J!j Profcmontil people have no prohlem, a doctor or an struction project by civil rights groups.eo There were no Negroes ~~ attorney or anybody else • ••. 12 '

1'1 *j

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r .~

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.. Even apart from the effects of nep~tism, Negroe~ are. discourag:d

from seeking admission to unions which have a pnor hIstory of dIS· crimination. William Ware, a Negro plumbing contractor in Cleve. land testified that because of discrimination by the Plumbers Union he had to fight for 30 years to get his employees into the 10ca1.78 Mr. Ware testified that "the entire non-Caucasian community knows what has happened to Bill Ware and his efforts ... [t]he Negr~ com· munity, the Negro youth, knows what rebuffs we have expenenced

h d· d" 74 and they are somew at lscourage .

The testimony of Mr. Ware suggests a nee~ ~or affi.rmat~ve ~ff?rts by unions to dispel the discouraging effects of pnor umon dIscnmma. tion-such as making available to minority groups information about apprenticeship programs.7G George Fink, Secretary-Treas~rer. of Plumbers Union Local 55 in Cleveland, was asked whether hIS umon was taking any affirmative steps to increase the number of minority group members in his local. Mr. Fink replied:

The door is open to everybody that can quality. We have been in this town for 75 years, and if they think they can quality, that is their privilege to apply.70

The Federal Government is attempting to provide entry for Negroes into the skilled construction trades by requiring. equal employment opportunity on Federal construction contracts.77 Under the. ter~~ of a Presidential Executive order federal contractors may not dIscnmmate in hiring or employment practices on the basis of race ar;d ~e required to take "affirmative action" to insure equal opportumty III employ· ment.7S Failure to comply can result in terminati.on of the contra~t ~nd ineligibility for future contracts.70 The Executive ~rder estabhshmg these requirements is administered by each contractmg agency under rules and regulations issued by the Department of Labor, whose Office of Federal Contract Compliance enforces the order.

Most construction contractors obtain their employees through unions with whom they have collective bargaining agreements provi?ing for a union hiring hall under which workers are referred excluslv:ly by the union.so Theoretically the union is required to refer non-umon as well as union workers.s1 But if a union discriminates against non· union members in referring workers and has few or no minority members, it will refer few or no minority workers.82

Even if the union abides by its obligation to refer non-union wor~ers, .. , a similar result may obtain if the union discriminates in referral agam,st i' ; minority non-union workers.88 Additionally, because the traditional ;" avenue for acquiring the necessary skills-the union-has been closed ':

54

to them, few non-union minority workers have such skills. Contractors fear that if they hire or train minority workers outside the hiring hall the unions will enforce their collective bargaining agreements through a strike or otherwise. J

F~r example, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART)-a publIc agency of the State of California established to build a modem rapid transit system throughout the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area-anticipates grants of up to $80 million in Federal funds. BART will employ approximately 8,000 people at peak construction times­an, estimated 2,000 operating engineers, 750 ironworkers and 350 plumbers. Although BART is subject to an "affirmative action" pro­gram promulgated on Dec. 22, 1966, by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance,a4 as of May, 1967, there were no Negroes among the 106 electricians, ironworkers and plumbers engaged on BART con­struction.8G

B. R. Stokes, BART's General Manager, was asked wha~BART could ?o to increase minority representation in job categorie.<; where the umons had few or no Negro members. Mr. Stokes replied:

We can implore, we can plead, we can call to the atten­tion, we can do all of these tht'ngs. We can make these things stipulations in our contracts. Beyond this there is not much We can do, sir.

The one thing under existing laws . .. that we can not get into are the collective bargaining agreements that exist between the contractors and the affected unions.so

Mr. Stok.es ~dicated ~at although BART is committed to equal opporturuty, ItS COmmItment would yield to the risk of delay that could follow from a labor dispute:

Our prime responsibility to the public which has voted this bc:nd a,uthority is to deliver the system as near like we promtsed tt and (/.$ nearly on time as we possibly Catl.

There was not in that bond issue . . . a social cost factor. 81

, T~e Commission also heard testimony from Morton Harris, Admin­Istrative Officer for S. S. Silberblatt, contractor for a $30 million Oak~ land Post Office construction job. Mr. Harris testified that there have ~een no Negro plumbers, operating engineers, sheet metal workers, lfonworkers, electricians or steamfitters on the job.B8

According. to Mr. Harris, contractors do not have the tools to fight the unions.

so 1£ the government required contractors to put Negroes

5S

on the job in each job category, Mr. Harris testified, they would be forced to hire non-union people and

. , , tomorrotlJ, the Post OfJice job would be shut do~~~ That is a reality of life, al1d I am sute you know thts. j

Union representatives were asked what they would d~ if ~ Federal' contractor hired outside the hiring hall in o~der to get mlllonty wor~­ers. The answer was unanimous-the umons would enforce theIr

contract.Ul .' •

Raymond Dones, a Negro electrical contract?r m th,e Bay Area, cntI-cized Federal contract compliance efforts as meffective. When asked whether he thought the new affirmative action program would be suc-

cessful, he replied: As I understand the new attempts, they are.ftill asking for voluntary compliance and there has been 1lO sh?w of force on the part of the Federal Government, and wzthout this show of force that they will in fact enforce the ,tetter and the spirit of this Exec~titJe Or1er ~1~46, there wzll not be any substantial compltance unth tt.

At the San. Francisco hearing, the Office of Feder~l Contr~ct Co~­Hance was represented by Vincent Macaluso, Ass1stant D~ector m

~harge of Construction, and Robert Magnuson, Area Coordmator for

San Francisco. . I bin Mr. Macaluso was asked what, as a practical m~tter) a p um . g

contractor in the Bay Area could do to comply With the Executive

order: MR. MACALUSO: What we do [re~uir~J ... is actively to seek and sponsor members of mtnorzty groups for pre-apprenticeship training . . , . . MR. GLICKSTEIN: Mr. Mazzola [of the Plumbe:s ,umon] said he was opposed to pre-apprenticeship tratmng • .•• MR. MACALUSO: [W]e deal with the contract~rs. Actually

fJice deals with the Federal agenctes and the out 0 w agencies deal with the contractor. . .

It was difficult to tell from Mr. Macaluso's testiI?ony ~hat POSlt1Ve

1 Id be achieved by the Bay Area affirmatIve .actlOn progra1l1, 11'-4 resu ts wou . . ld b 'Vercome" since he did not indic.at~ how ~ion O~pOSlt10? ",:"ou eo" ; In response to Comll11SSlOner Gnswold s question. .

Have the efforts of your ofJice br?ught about the ~mpI;/~ " ment of one minority plumber t1i the San Franc1Sco ay

Area?

Mr. Magnuson, replied: "Not to my knowledge." 04

Since Federal construction contracts create many job opportunities, termination or suspension of such contracts would have a substantial adverse effect on the employment prospects of union members. Never­theless, Mr. Macaluso testified that to his knowledge, no Federal construction contract ever has been terminated for non-compliance.U5

And the sanction of suspending the award of contracts has been used rareiy.96

Another way in which the Federal Government has attempted to cQmbat union discrimination is through the work of the Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training (BAT).

BAT promotes and registers apprenticeship programs. Registration provides the legal basis for Federal support of the apprenticeship pro­gram. Such support, although not extensive, includes technical assist­ance and some .financial benefits.P7 To be registered a program must meet certain Federal standards which are incorporated into BAT regulations.us These regulations require that the selection of apprentices to fill job openings must be based on "qualifications alone," using non­discriminatory criteria.99

The Commission heard testimony at its Cleveland hearing describ­ing the testing and apprenticeship selection procedure5 of the Joint Apprenticeship Committee of Plumbers Local 55.100 This local's pro­gram is registered with the Ohio State Apprenticeship Council. Such registration automatically qualifies an apprenticeship program for Federat support where the State requirements for registration, as in Ohio, meet Federal requirements.101 The program is serviced and compliance monitored by BAT's Cleveland office since the Ohio Council has no field staff.loll

As of April 1966, only one of the 163 apprentices in the program was Negro.lOB Martin Kilbane, Chairman of the Joint Apprenticeship Committee and a member of the union, testified that his committee gives preference to friends and relatives of union members:

MR. GLICKSTEIN: I notice that on the application form this question appef#'s: "Have you any relatives or In'ends in the plumbing trade?" What is the purpose of this question? MR. KILBANE: Well, we sort of feel that all things being equal, when we are placing apprentices and they are on the qualified list, tlzat if we have an application from let us say, a son of a plumber, we will definitely try to place h£m, all things being equal/04

277-4)1'1 0-67~ 57

,6

Oscar Poole BAT's representative responsible for reviewing the plumbers' app;enticeship program, testified that he never had made a field review of Local 55's procedures.10G Mr. Poole was asked whether, on the basis of Mr. Kilbane's .testimon.y, he ~ought that ~le.~ plumbers apprenticeship program was In c~mpl:;nce ~lth ,the requl!,~­ment that apprentices be selected on the baSIS of q,,\~hficatlOns alone :

MR. POOl.E: I would say that if the Commifltee made .its selection on the basis of its qualification and seleetton procedure, that has been registered with the State COU1!~ cil) using the evaluation, the1t they, would be m com plial1ce.

* * * I MR. GLICKSTEIN: They are in compliance even though as 1 you heard Mr. Kilbane testify all things beil1.g equal, ! preference will be given to sam or relat~tles of members? I MR. PO~l.E: T h~~/s flOt on the evalttatton. [form] of the I.

apprenttce. . . • .' Mr. Poole maintained, in the face of Mr. Kilbane's t:stimony, that'

the program was in compliance and asserted that he dId not propose to undertake a field review of the program unless the OhlO State Apprentic~ship Council requested one:

MR. GLICKSTEIN: What do you propose to do as a result of the testimony you heard he.re today? , MR. POOLE: W hellever there tS a com~lawt 01'. a re.quest from the State Council to review and dtscuss t~tS w,zth the Plumbers Committee) that will be my functton tf I am

. d d' 107 destgnate to 0 tt . ••. The FUght of Jobs. Those confined to the ghettos of the central

city today are faced with another serious obstacle to .employment-:the movement of industry from the city. Jobs-both pnvate and pubhc­increasingly are being dispersed from large urban centers to smaller cities and suburban areas.10B

• "

San Francisco Mayor John F. Shelley testified that smallmdustry ill San Francisco was "bit by bit moving out":

58

Why are they moving out? Because,we are only a~out 451

46 square miles in our geog~aphtc area: the C!ty and county of San Franci.fCo l and these small tndustrt~s ~ere operatingin two and three a~d four story loft buz!dmgs. Their handli1lg expenses, thew overhead w.er~ gotng up, and yet the property upon which that bmltltng was lo-

-------------------~---. -'

--------------,------ - -,-

cated kept incre(lSing in value and they were on high cost property . ... As a res'ult, a lot of these small industries have moved down the Peninsula, across to Alameda County, Contra Costa Co,unty.l09

This exodus, Mayor Shelley stated, reduced the availability in San Francisco of blue collar work.

The impact on minority workers, especially minority youths, was sharp. Orville Luster testified:

[I]n a cit)1 like San Francisco where you have bee1llosing a lot of your factories, and this type of thing) since 1950, we are m·ore of a financial center) it makes it very difficult

fi d h b · I • b 110 to n +.. t e egmners 10 s. . • .

Lyle Schaller, a city planner in Cleveland-a heavily industrial city-told the Commission:

Most (,4 the employment opportunities openitzg up are in the suburban communities, many of them in the southern and western part of the counties are quite some dzstance from where the Negro population lives. ... It raises a problem in terms of simply knowing about the jobs being advertised, of getting there before the job is filled, and this kind of thing, plus the problem of trans­portation which is a serious problem tor many Negro families.1l1

The city of Oakland-in Alameda County-has a population of 385,700. About 120,000 are nonwhite. The unemployment rate for the Negro population was 13 percent; another 10 percent of the male working force was neither working nor looking for work; the unem­ployment rate for teenagers was 41 percent. Yet, in the suburban por­tions of Alameda County-where there are approximately 185,000 jobs at all skill levels-only a small fraction, roughly 3,700, are held by Negroes.U2

Few Negroes live in suburban Alameda County. Public transporta­tion from central city to suburban areas is limited and expensive and the cost of commuting by car, which includes automobile insurance, license fees, and substantial expenditures for gasoline and maintenance, is more than most slum residents can afford.l

1.S Employers, moreover, prefer to hire persons liv;ng clOse to work in order to reduce absentee­ism and to build a labor pool which can be recalled easily after layoffs. The suburban Fremont plant of Trailmobile Division of Pullman, Inc., at one time hired employees who lived in Oakland, 25 miles away.

59

r, j . I 1 .~

! q

.,.' ........ ,

1\ \

. \\\ This 'policy changed in 1961, according to the tes~mony of Leo~. I Smith, personnel manager, wh~. nine em?loyee~ m the. comp~~y S I critical metal department were 1nJuted senously m a chain col1~slOn I of vehicles on the approach to the San francisco-Oakland Bay Br~~ge. , The company then decided t? ~estrict its hiring to person~ hvmg "closer to the plant to try and ehromate the Rtoblem of.absen~eelsm due

£ 'dents )' 114 The result of thls change 1ll poltcy was to to reeway aCCl • . restrict employment possibilities for Negroes. i

I '

\ ~ HOt/sing ,1;"

Asked at an open meeting what sh? would do if she had a be:te~ ~ . . l.,f-s Charlotte Gordon a resldent of a Gary slum, rephed. i j

i

Income, lVll • , f h 'hb !i "The first thing I would do myself is to move out 0 t e nelg or- I~"l hood" 115 . 1"

A~other resident of the same area, Mrs. Friels:tin reply to the identi- 1,1 cal question, said she would like, to move to so~eplace where,,~~ ':;\ could have; a lawn, you know;. and lust breathe free a~ for a ch~ge, .;1

To many slum residents, just as to other Am,er.Icans, movmg ~o a better neighborhood may mean more than obtammg ~etter h5>usmg. For one thing it may give their children the opportUnlty to grow ux in a healthier' atmosphere. Mrs. Gordon explained why she wante

to move: I feel this is a slum, and if your children grow up in this .~ kind of thing, netlerseeing anytlJing else,. what are they to knoUl about it? You tell them about tt, but ho(.f) can

lb' ? 11'1 you tell tltem a out zt The opportUnity to move outside the ghetto als~ m!lY m~jln the

opportunity to send children to better schools. And It ma~ ?nng o~~ closer to job opportunities; the flight of jobs fro?I central cltles :.;: : not resent a barrier to employment opportunity for ~egroes 1 ey wer~ able to live in the areas where the jobs were bemg relocated. :;4

Negroes who live in slum ghettos, however, ha~e been ~able to r;1 move to suburban communities and other exclUSIvely whIte areas. rfA I t this inability stems from a refusal by suburbs and other com- ~a n par , . h' 118 E en Negroes who can I~~

munities to accept low~mcome ousmg. v ~ afford the housing available in these areas, however, have been ex- ,~ eluded by the racially discriminatory practices not on~y of prope: ; owners themselves, but also of real estate brokers, bu~lde:s and .':

h fi m· dustry 119 An important factor contrlbutmg to, ~x orne nance· h b th hCles

clusion of Negroes from such areas, moreover, as een e po and practices of agencies of government at all1evels.

60

d

Own~rs and Realtors. Vialter Sowell, a Negro who was Superin­tendent Engineer with the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Author­ity, testified at the Cleveland hearing that he had 'tlooked over the entire Cuyahoga County" for a home and a neighborhood within his means. He was told on the phone that he could not buy a house be­cause he was Negro, "but never face to face . . . there were a lot of excuses given. . . . [T]he second call or third call, usually the house was sold or something happened and it was transferred to another real estate company .•.. " l~O He further testified that

... being in housing for 21 years or most of my life} knotfJ­ing something about prices, we would see a house listed for, say, $18,0{)0. We know th£i; particular house was built by a particular builder and we see them all otler the city. It was $18,000. When it got to me, it was $23,000 or $24,000.121

Mrs. Allie Anderson, a welfare mother" told the Commission at the Cleveland hearing that she had been refused apartments while look~ ing for a new apartment on Cleveland's East Side:

[MJost of the decent places they don't want colored, and especially otler in the Shaw and Hayden area they euould

,tell me the place ,was taken, or etlen that they weren't acceptil1.g the Negroes now.122

The Commission heard testimony that many real estate agents avoid showing Negroes homes in "white" areas. Leonard Simmons, a Negro graduate student and faculty member at Western Reserve Uni­versity, told the Commission that real estate agents

, • c • only show you homes that are available in Negro areas or areas that are predominantly Negro or where there are large numbers of Negroes. They say they would be quite willing to show a prospective buyer a home in a11-yarea. Unfortunately, the owner is not willing to sell to the Negro buyer. This is what the real estate agent tells the buyer. This is what they told me. I then came across a real estate agent who happened to own the home I was inter­ested in. He told me the same thing. 1 said you own this home so you can't say the owner is unwilling to sell to a Negro. "He told me: "You wouldn't be happy in this neighborhood." He was very concerned about my '- . I 128 napptness •••

61

. "

""'-.

Other testimony in Cleveland suggested that there were agreements between Negro and white real .estate agents to confine Negroes to particular areas. Robert Crumpler~ describing his attempt to purchase a home in a "white" area~ testifi~d:

We called very many ti.mes . .•. If you called about a house that is listed witj~ ••• a [white] real estate dealer} the telephone girl answers and says there is no one at the office at this time that can tell you about this particular property but we will have him call you back, and some~ how they never called back. 1 think earlier the gentleman mentioned a crisscross directory where they have tele~ phone numbers by streets. If you ~re living.on Ansel y~u are either a Negro or Polish and tf you dectded to stay m that area, then you are not much more desirable than the Negro, so several days later we got a call from a Neg;o real estate dealer who just happened to have some mce property in a fringe area that would be available to us • •.. :124

Mrs. Robert Goiter and Mrs. Sheldon Kurland-whh:e real estate agents in Nashville-described for the Teru:essee Stat~ Advisory Com­mittee the practices of real estate agents m Nashville. Mrs. GoIter

c:;;

stated: When I received my license to sell real estate a year ago, 1 had very few thoughts about th~ problems, possibilities and chcllienges of finding comfortable, attractive homes for Negroes. When a friend who was Negro indica~ed her desire to buy a ftome,l asked one of the partners of the company the policy. He indicated that 1 could sell to a Negro only if there was another Negro family in the block.l began searching for such a block. The search was disappointing indeed • ••. After 1 talked with a half dozen agents about selling one of their listings to a Negro I leamed otler and otler again that this not only did not get me into the house, in some instances, it eliminated the possibilitY' of my ever showing any of that company's listings to any client.125

Mrs. Kurland said that most white realtors with whom she had talked would lind a home for a Negro buyer in an already integra~ed section, but not in an all~white neighborhood because ~'the whites wouldn't stand [for] the situation." 126

62

Finance Indusl~ry. Discriminatory practices are indulged in by representatives of the finance industry as well. In San Francisco the Commission heard charges that lending institutions in some :u.eas would I'not make nrst mortgages to racial minorities who move out-'d f e 'b d » 121 J P B 81 e 0 pr ~Ctl e areas.,... ames . rown, representing the

Atlanta Savmgs and Loan AssocIation, told the Georgia State Advisory Committee that his Association would be "reluctane~ to make a loan to a Negro w~~ w~ted to p~chase a home in an all~white n.eighbor­hood because It mIght-and It has caused discord-and reflects upon us in some way." Mr. Brown staJed:

We like ~o keep things pleasant and we like to keep our communtty more-or-less stable.l mean by tllat, alZ finance people feel like this. We have a nice, pretty neighborhood and everything's working fine, we want to keep every­body happy and keep it like that, and not antagonize them or stir them up and it seems to do that, so in a12SWer to ... [the question], it would be with relucta12ce:128

Bttilders. Builders~ particularly large scale tract developers in the su~urbs, also have contributed to keeping Negroes out of white neighborhoods. I~ Daly City, Calif., the enormous Serramonte housing developmer;t, which eventual~y will provide moderate priced housing for ap~ro~mately 20,000 resIdents, was picketed by demonstrators protestm~ Its alleged all-white sales policies. Although the picketing resulted ill agreement that discriminatory practices would cease at the Commission's Bay Area hearing testimony was heard that there were no Negroes living in Serramonte and discriminatory practices were ~ontinuing.121l .

As aconseqm;nce of these practices, for many Negro families house hU?ting is a long, discouraging, humiliating experience. Mrs. Merlin ReId, a Negro resident of Boston, told the Commission)s:Massachusetts State Advisory Committee: "

~':~ We ••• approached atzother agent, in the same town in !.t~\.. reference to houses advertised in the daily 1zewspapers. ~(j We f,lIere politely shown those houses which were in poor ~ condition, or by some coincidence were already sold . ... .~ We finally decided to try another tOW1l. The agents, it ,j seemed, were wai.ting for us at the door. We received the

same polite treatment and we departed with the same feeling of degradation . •. • 180

, Complaint~riented State fair. housing laws may provide a remedy but only at the price of a substantial investment of time, effort and

63

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i'

I

expense. Asked whether he had complained to the agency responsible for administering the Ohio Fair Housing Law, Walter Sowell replied

opposite Branch Brook PU'rk d h ' in the suburbs •••• 18'/' an t e otherzs practically

that he had not:

. . . I was like a lot of other people-you sort of lose patience when you are losing money, you are losing time"

'. ! : In Cleveland; the COnun!~!:l'~", t_ •. n .1.1 . 1 -,,~ vu .LVU lU mat at th ti J: • ill 966, seven of the 11 public h' , . e me OL Its hearing

h 'b 1lI1 Jlf)U ave a 10 ...•

Role of Government. Local governments often engage in prac­tices which contribute to housing segregation or fail to seize oppor­tunities to reduce it Some of these practices and omissions were revealed at the hearings and open meetings. .

Daly City and the company which was building Serramonte had entered into an annexation agreement by which the city agreed to provide certain municipal services to Serramonte. The Mayor of Daly City, Bernard Lycett, testified that Daly City, in return, would derive substantial benefits including tax revenue from having anneXEd the tract. Despite this agreement, the city authorities felt there was n.othing the city could do to induce Serramonte to abandon its discriminatory ~ housing policy.1S2

Planning agencies often fail to consider means of preventing new ghettos from developing, Ferris Deep, Director of the Metropolitan Planning Comm.ission in Nashville, told the Tennessee State Advisory Committee that the Planning Commission, in· planning for the city's development, neither attempts to avoid creation of racial ghettos nor ~. to break. up concentrations of people of low income,lS3 Thus, the Planning Commission was oblivious to such matters in locating public housing projects.1M

•

In 1966; the Commission's New Jersey State Advisory Committee was told that 16 years after passage of the New Jersey law prohibiting discrimination in housing, four of Newark1s 13 public housing develop­ments were 90 to 99 percent Negro. Of three housing developments for the elderly opened in Newark in 1965, one was 97 percent white) one wai· 95 percent white, and one was 92 percent Negro/a5 Similarly, although racial designations have been removed from the public housing projects in Nashvil1e~ 12 of the 14 low-rent public housing projects there are more than 99 percent Negro or 99 percent white.18G

Louis Danzig, Executive Director of the Newark Housing Author­ity, was asked at an open meeting to explain why he had referred to two \ predominantly white public housing projects as "the country club projects." He answered:

[T]he reason they are called country club projects is that they are on the periphery of the city, mid one is right

90 percent Negro or more "l.. ou9s0mg projects were either more than

£ • • Ulan percent white 188 In th 2 o Its eXIstf.nCe, no Negro ever h db', . e 0 years white Riverside Park deve1opme~ Ae~ das.~gned to the 100 percent offered a unit in Riverside E t' B shne

1 a Negro had ever been M r ' rnes 0 Director f th Cl etropo Itan Housing Authodty, replied:' 0 e,eve1and

, No unit has been offered to them R' , " at'rfort Cl$ you know. It is in the ~ werside, zt tS near the shtp area all white and' eart of a home-owner_ . ..t.... '. ' stnce so many N e J. refused to /tfJe in a rad II ' . groes n.afJe Sid~ .. -. 1 _ a Y zntegrated place on the West

c;, we: nave not ogered any -I th b edge, and I check . . ,,0 e est of my knowl-tions office ;d tht~ qUtte recently with the applica­Riverside.lS~ no egro as expressed a desz're to live at

, AttheopenmeetinginBoston Re G'Ib . • m Roxbury, described the situ / v'th l MertAvery, pastor of a church Hill Extension public housin a Ion ,at e

H ission Hill and the Mission

W g proJects. e reported: hen I cam(? here five years a h

families in the Mission Hill P 'g~ t ere were 1,024 white iNes. At the M£ssio~ RII E ro~ect ami no Negro fam­£lies of which 500 t 711 xtenston there were 580 fam-

were 1. v egro These tw . , across the street from each othe; d h 0 pr01ects are manager and are consicl d an t e? have the same h .J' ere as one pr01ect But I h eara SIX and seven year I'll h 'ld: • ave white and N eo' 0 c t ren refer to them as the ~he two projec;:is tko;~~~B~~ke~S~reet wht'ch dt'vides tng authority was oin n ad. In 1962 the h(>us-day the white pr~ect ~;:Qs~~rff;egate the protects but to­Negro pro,'ect h' percent whzte and the

as rIsen to 98 percent N 1 1.. 'rentaloffice there are tw 'd egro. n trle and one for the Ext . 0 WInd ows, one tor Mission Hill '., enszon, an except tor tl. b

ttl/O Stgns.saytng "White" and (( '" rt.~a 'S,e12ce of mingham, Alabama Th . i?lor~d. It mIght be Bir~ and a titze of Negroes'pa1Ji~: thtS ,ttera l~o a line of whites

L al ./' <5 etf rent. oC. governments c;ontribute to . 11 •

~erns 111 other \l:!ays. The Cleve! raCla y ~egregated housmg pat-IS one of the few pubIi h . and Me?,opoIitan Housing Authority stru t d C ousmg- agencles with th 'th . c an operate public ho' . th e <iU Otlty to con-

usmg m e surrounding suburbs.14.1 Yet

65

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all of the public housing in the Cleveland metropolitan area is con­centrated within the core of Cleveland. Mr. Bohn testified that before public housing can be constructed in. a. suburban community there'.. I: must be an agreement between that community and the Federal Government under which the community agrees to render the usual municipal services that it performs for a private developer.142 Because the suburbs have refused to enter into such agreements, it has not been possible to use public housing as an instrument to reduce residen-tial segregation within the metropolitan area and provide an oppor-tunity for movement out of the ghetto. . .. . .

The main effort of the Federal Government to end dIscnmmatlOn in federally assisted housing in the private sector has been through t

Executive Order 11063 issued by President Kennedy in 1962.143 The :l coverage of Federal regulation is only partial-it is estimated that the ~J Executive order covers approximately 23 percent of new hOllsing/4! ~ primarily purchased with funds' secured by mortgages ins~r~d by·i the Federal Housing Administration.145 This represents a mI111scule [ portion, less than 2 percent, of the total national housing supply of 65 million units.146

Witnesses at Commission hearings alleged that Federal policy was not being effectively implemented. In the San Francisco Bay Area FHA insures mortgages on 51 percent of all new housing starts,147 a "1

more significant share of the market than elsewhere in t~e co~ntry, ; Staff investigation, however, showed that few Negroes lived ill the 1

new housing tracts and communities of the Bay Area where FHA had insured mortgages or had made commitmen~s to insu~e.

Jack Tuggle, Deputy Director of the San FranCISco Insuf1~g Office, was responsible for carrying out the provisions of the ExecutiVe order in the Bay Area. He testified that when builders apply for mortgage insurance or other FHA services he "calls their attention" to the fact that they have signed a statement that they will not discriminate.Hs

The builders, however, are not required to attempt to reach the ~egro ~arket or to advertise that their policy is one of equal opporturuty or even to make known to potential buyers that they are subject to the requirements of the Executive ord:r. . .

job to improve housing standards and to try to create lT$

much housing available as possible to all persons • •• ,:1150

It was Mr. Tuggle's feelitlg that "anything that would tend to ,c,ause us [the ~HA] to lose a position in the market, and the influence that we exert In the market ... might not be as se1f~serving for the cause as we would like for it to be." m

Mrs .. Lucy Buchbinder, chairman of the Housing Opportunities Co~t~e~ of the C?un~il for Civic Unity of the San Francisco Bay

Area! cnnclZed .FHA s failure to insist that developers of FHA insured housmg advertIse that they are operating under the Executive order She explained why such a policy should be required: .•

[T]heret's s':'Ch along history of new housing beitJg afJail~ able for whttes,only that ~nless we engage in a really fJig~ orous, affirmatlfJe campatgn to make t't known that some housing is open) the minority community will not come and look. 152

Mrs. Buchbinder testified that she had made this suggestion to the Department of Housing and Urban Development and to FHA and had been told t?at ~'to make developers identify their tracts as being equal OPPOrtunIty tracts would be discrimination against them." 168

, ~o enfor~e the Executive order, FHA relies on complaints filed by VICtun~ agamst the offending builder, deVeloper or landlord.154 Mrs. Buchbmder stated that her experience has. co.tlVinced her "that the case-by-case approach is very slow." 155 In order to process a complaint Mr~. B?chbinder testified, she had to "obey the rules of the game": whIch mcluded keeping a client who was "live and willing and able to buy the house." She testified also that "once the house was made available, .that this was the end of the case" ; 156 no sanction was imposed on the builder who was guilty of discriIIliI).ation.

Wha~ has been the impact of the Executive orde~ in the Bay Area? Accordmg to Mrs. Buchbinder:

[T]he Ex~cutt've Order has made no visible impact at all. If you go t~to any of the tracts in suburbia, you flJltl see that u:hat IS hapPen,ing actually is that white ghettos are growmg up at a rapid rate/51

Mr. Tuggle felt that builders domg busmess WIth. FHA should .not be required to pursue a vigorous equal opport~mty program. smce. their competition was not subject to such requrrements. He VIewed his agency primarily as a service agency to t~e housing ~ndustry and believed that builders subject to such requrrements might be hurt linanciall y and might cease to do business with FHA: 149

It is out job to enforce the order) of course. It is olso our

Th~ failure of government to correct housing discrimination !. contnb~tes to the skepticism of ghetto residents that opportunities :. for .leavmg the ghetto ever will become available. Leonard Simmons

t~stiBe~ that he had filed four complaints alleging housing discrimina­tion WIth the Ohio Civil Rights Commission and that none of them

66 67.

i I j

I J

. ~.

. ' 1 d 158 He stated that he "no longer pos-had been satIsfactonly reso ve . th 1 . t "159 He believed that

ary to file e comp am s. sessed, the energy nec:ss ld have a "depressing" effect on the belief expenences s~chas thhis WffOl,l If-improvement would enable them of Hough resIdents at e orts at se , to escape the ghetto:

I ked very hard to make myself acceptable to the

68

. 'h"te ~:munity and to do all those things that are cpon­w t d I fi d that I am excluded. or sidered acceptable an 1 yet, n , ' " that I those eople who have not had the opportunttte~ have lad or are still trying to improve themselves, I ~ s~re that they must become extremely sk,eptical as to w et er

it is worthwhile.loo

They wanted to set up an isolated elite type of community and they are going to do everything to protect their feelings in this.1

Racial Isolatiqn and Social Responsibility As a result of racial and economic segregation, white communities

are growing up in virtually complete isolation from Negroes and other persons of different racial backgrounds. In its study, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools, the Commission found that the current trend toward residential and school segregation resulting in isolation of the races is likely to increase in the future,2

M. L. S(lnford is the Executive Secretary of the San Lorenzo Vil­lage Homes Association, an association of 11,000 persons living a few miles south of Oakland. At the Bay Area hearing, Mr. Sanford was

i asked what the feelings were in his community about the problems of Oakland's ghetto areas. He answered: "1 think for the moment they feel somewhat isolated by it because they are removed physically

r from it! it being a bedroom community." 8

~~ Rev, Dorel Londagin, a white minister whose congregation lives in " San Leandro, a suburb of moderately priced homes adjacent to the

Negro ghetto in Oakland, also spoke of the isolation of his con-1 gregation from Negro communities and city problems. He told the ~, Commission: "[T]here is some concern but I don't think it's enough .; concern. I don't think they realize the potential danger that exists b , such a situation. . . ." 4

Negro leaders from central cities criticized white suburban com­munities for demonstrating irresponsible attitudes towards the prob­

, lems of Negro ghettos.5 Donald McCullum, an attorney and President of the Oakland Branch of the NAACP~ testified:

••• San Leandro is ,not concerned about the hard core un­employed. Orinda'is not concerned about de facto segre~

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gation. Lafayette is not concerned about the problem~ of the 'ghetto. San Lorenzo is not concerned ab?ut :ne htgh crime rate. No concern, no problem, no actzon.

The white suburbs, which depend upon ,the city for many services, do not put back what they take out, accordmg to Mr. McCullum:

(W]e hatle the parasitical cities arou11d Oa,k1and that dtaw on all of the resources ami at the same ttme they do not put anything in the cetJtral city; and we have the problems of health and welfare a1zd crime ~n t~e centra! city while we have the highest type of soctal trresponst~ biUty by the inhabitants of [the su~ur~s of) San Leandro; Piedmont, Orinda, Lafayette. T h1s IS th~ probl~m. that we are grappling with throughout Amertc~, T hzs IS the base problem in this country, the domestic. p,:oblem at urbanization in the central city and the soetal trresponst~ bility of those who control and rUt2 the city and have no il1 puts hack into the city.1

The Commission inquired why so little effort was b:ing exerted by suburban communities to help resolve problems affectmg Negroes who live in the central cities. In Cleveland, Robert Kruse, the Mayor of Solon, Ohio-a suburb of approximately 8,4?~ ~eople-wa? asked if he believed his community had any resp?nslblhty to contnbute to the solution of Cleveland's problems. He rephed:

Our first aim is to develop a commutlity without these problems, and if in some, way we can, help, so!tle oth~ commtmity's problems wtthout assumm,K ~tmtl~r prob lems, yes. Because there is a moral prt1lctple mtloZved

here.s

Where Negroes are able to obtain e!Uployment in subu:ban ~O~_i munities, they incur extra costs because they often cannot hve Wlthln a reasonable distance of their work and must c~mmu~e. y et ~uburb~ communities rarely ease this burden by, adop?n? fal! housmg ordi: nances, facilitating construction of housmg wlth~ the ~e~s of th Negro workers, or making available transportatlon £aclhtles to pro-

vide access to suburban employment. , At the time of the Commission's hearing in San FranCISCO, there

were about 1,000 Negroes among the some 5,200 em~loyees of.the Gen­eral Motors plant in suburban Fremont.1! Yet, accordmg to testllnpny by Mayor Donald Dillon: "a pretty small number" of the Negro workers moved into Fremont.l.<l The Mayor said that Fremont opposed construe-

70

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clon of low-middle income housing because the community feared there was a '(devious plan" to move Negroes in!l

Some 4,500 workers commute daily from Cleveland to work in the industries located in suburban Solon-a city with one Negro resident. Asked whether there was "any public means of transportation to bring these people to work," Mr. Kruse testified that "[t]here is a very very limited bus service there." 12 '

The Commission also heard testimony bringing into question the social responsibility of industry in dealing with the problems con­fronting ghetto residents.

For example, Leonard Mitchell, the Director of Industrial Relations of the Lockheed Missile and Space Company-an almost 100 perc~nt government contractor located in the suburban community of Sunny­vale, Calif.-testified that although Lockheed was required by its gov­ernment contracts to take affirmative action to hire minority employees, the company did not think its responsibility included assuring minority workers that they would be able to find housing in Sunnyvale,18 When employees are recruit.ed no attempt is made to assure them they will be able to find suitable housing in the Sunnyvale area, no list of housing available in the area is maintained, and no attempt is made to raise with local public officials the question of the availability of housing on a non~ discriminatory basis. "We are not involved in the housing aspects at all," Mr. Mitchell stated.u

The Rheem Manufacturing Company has a plant located in an unincorporated area of Contra Costa County, Calif., adjacent to the City of Richmond. Although the company has a labor force (half of whom are unskilled workers) which is nearly all white/5 the area i~ which it is located, North Richmond, is an all-Negro slum.16 North Rlchmond has the usual-physical and social problems as!;ociated with slums, compounded by the absence of services a city government could provide,l1 -

Several residents of North Richmond instituted proceedings for the annexation of North Richmond by the City of Richmond. Proponents

, believed that annexation would result in the provision of better services, particularly police protection-highly inadequate in North Richmond.1s

The Rheem Manufacturing Company opposed annexation, and along with other property owners was instrumental in blocking it on the ground that annexation would increase taxes,l\) Witnesses est~mated that the tax increase would have been no more than $10,000 per Yf.ar,20 The North Richmond plant had a total of $7,000,000 a year in s"les and the total sales of the corporation were $135,000,000 annuallyP

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~'It's really, pure and simple, a financial n;atter as far as we are con- I

caned" ~2 said the plant manager. He testified that he was not aware of the ;roblems which existed in the neighborhood of his plant,~3

Racial Isolation and White Attitudes i l

Some white parents have expressed concern over the fact that y~eir children are growing up in an all-white environment. Dr. Leon Tnl1~gl 0; of Brookline, Mass" directed a program designed to bring Negro chil- I "

dren from city schools to suburban schools. He explai~ed that one of dle reasons why parents in that suburban communIty favored. the

program was: .•• concern over tht: fact that the youngsters in the sub~r-ban towns sut't'ounding Boston were ' , . all whtte, segt'egated in a seme, and that out' YOUIt.gst:rs, t~erefo:e, have an especially na1'1'OW view of the soctety tn whtch they are later going to w01k and, hopefully, some of them take positions of responsibility.Z4.

Dr. Trilling's program was organized by dle Metropolitan C,oundl for Educational Opportunity (METCO), a nonprofit corporatIon, A white parent, Mrs. Katherine Endris, who worked with the program, testified about the benefits derived from it:

[A]i a white pare11t, I feel, that if.my child gt'ows up w~th a prejudiced, bigoted, na1'1'OW mtnd,. and knows not~tn¥ about those who diUet' from him t1t any way, he ~sn t t'eally fully educated, and when he goes out into, the world •.• he will associate with people of many drffer~ ent races, then he will not be prepared to really relate to

these people.25

A white high school student at one of the schools involved in the METCO program testified that she had been "shocked» at her younger brother~s remarks about Negroes and attributed them to his lack of

contact with Negro students.26

. ' .,

Most white persons, however, seem to prefer to mamtaID thelr Isola-

tionfromminority groups. 21

Jack Maltester, Mayor of San Leandro, was asked why Negroes do not buy homes in San Leandro. He answered:

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I dotlt thin~ it is the teal estate people nor the lendi1~g institutions.! think it's the people themselves. I'm. qutte sure that any rcal estate man would sell any home tn San

J

Leandro to a N cWo if the seller of that home gatle them the go-ahead. T /tete is still the feat' that if one home ls sold to a Negro

the whole block will be sold to Negroes and then the next block . .•• I guess . .. [this] did happen in the W cst Oak­land atea. And this, I think is the basis of fear.2

1!

Donald Dillon, former Mayor of Fremont, testified that white home­owners fear 'Ian avalanche . • . of minority groups movJng into the

. community," 2\) "

M. L. Sanford described the £leeUngs white people in San Lorenzo have about Negroes moving into the area in significant numbers:

... I thitJk they feat the concentration, and number t.!/JO, I think they ate inclined to look at some of the worst or the m~st unsatisfactorily maintained areas of Oakland or Rtchm~nd or elsewhere w),lere you have this lat'ge COtt­

ce?tratton and ~here the homes a:rc not propedy main­Patned, and I thmk the peopl'fJ fear an economic loss if this should occur . •.•

* * * ,This is not the only expression I hear. I think . .. there IS vet'y definitely a prejudice in our community, in G~ur whole area.BO

Mr. Sanford described the response of the Village Association to the prejudicein San Lorenzo: ~

My ~oard of l.irectOt's, who am elected by the people, have co?ststently, tn all the years that I have been there, you mIght say, completel)l ignored the subject of integration. They have remained silent 0;1;\ the subject.3l

Rev. Londagin attempted to find a home for a Negro family in. San ~eandro. He stat~d he would do this for any parishioner who comes mto the communlty~

When Jt was made known that I was showing this [house] to colored people, I received phone calls atJ!d a ~reat, deal .of it~terest was det/eloped, some who sym­pathzzed wzth my concern and some, most, who did n()t.~2

Although the Negro family never moved. in, Rev. Londagin testified that:

[AJ gt'eat deal of anget' was developed in the commu;nity and directed pn'marily toward me and the church.S1!.

The real estate industry often uses white prejudice to further its own

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, tion 84. Mrs, Genevieve Jefferson, ends, reinforcing resthidentl~ddsleg~egoame M' e'Ir:ed Heights area of San

hi 'd t of e ml e-IDC' . a w te res! en t industry played upon econorruc Francisco, tes~ed ~a~~e ~eal~sta~e period that the population itl fears and racIal preJu lC~ ur ~. " The area had had very few

. hb h d was I'm transitlon, 60 her nelg ?: O? 50 b . 1967 the population was more than . Negro fa~ilies ~~9 d~sc~~b~d the concerns expressed by her whlte percent egro, e b oving into the neighborhood: neighbors when Negroes egan m , .

Ie who clearly are preludzced, ~~:: =:: $::: of::: people who were 'honestl~ puz-

Z d They really didn't know what was happe~tng to ' Z e , d h e people whose tncorne ~heir l1eigh;:~h?ft;i;~o~ee=::~heir greatest investrne~t IS not too ~ " A t was happening to thezr and they ,ust weren t sure w Jfl . h 85 neighborhood and thetr orne. . . . ,

. h th t "some of their fears were dehberately Mrs. Jefferson thoug ~ ~ their effort to secure listings for resell­

fanned by real estate dea :s ill d her husband had ~een contacted by ing." 86 She stated that sean d th to sell their property because real estate people who encourage. e~ d' Negroes were moving into the neIghbor 00, , '

, hen a very tntelltgent man I guess the first trnpact was w , ,the law11

e b and started to chat, We were mo;o.tng

~~l~ h/asked if we had tho~ght about sedtng ~ur ho~e and would we like an appratsal, and we t;~::;;it::::le we weren't at all interested, and tt~n h;.i

a thi ((1 wot,ld

conversation wiJich ~ent somet tnfg

Z! e~";ths'someth;ng

d att 2f I were you 0 IY..S w· sure be amn rn . d II And I was puz­liJ,e this happening in the netghborhoo . , d' _ '\ ' . "I still pretty natve, an we ex

zled at thzs pomt., was II I said, ((What do you changed convers(lf,ton, and fina y, '9" And he said,

? Because of Negroes rnotltng tn d ~;:Zl, of course." So I told ~im that both my :7S%~:~:a:d

, I had been very proud ot the way o~~ ,n g, here

t'n+egrated without any' unseernly actwtttes, that t S~

" . d ul1happ1) events. • . .

l' ; )

t. I' " " '

'if I •• , . ~ 11 ]'\ J

4 ) Ij :i"~

il'i,',',! "{ J '{

~:t ~ ;~t ~';.

~I :1 '.I

And I said, trW hat do you mean} relocating? Is this an iUrban renewal area?" And he saidJ "OhJ nOI nOI no. We afe helping families who want to get out to live in a decent place." Well, our conversation terminated shortly therect/tef, but there were these kinds of UlayS of pla:ying on' the fears of people. One elderly woman who was re­cently widowed was helped to move to a "safer" place and she didn't Watlt to rnove, but her fears. w~e just played upon.ss

Proximity of white and Negro families in an area will not itself produce racial harmony where the white people involved are unwill­ing to accept Negroes on an equal basis. In San Francisco's Potrero Hill area, for example, white and Negro people live in close proximity but are not part of the same community. The majority of Potrero Hill

, residents are white and live in private single-family structures around the sides of the hill. At the top of the hill are 833 public housing units occupied by 4,000 people, the large majority of whom are Negro. Robert Jacobs, a tormer resident of the public housing project and a community worker in the project, described the separation of the races on Potrero Hill:

~j J :1 J [W]hat we have in our area, known as Potrero Hill, is {! an invisible wall .•. People understand that when you '\ get to the apex of the Hill, which, as far as the blacks and ·1 whites are concerned, is about 22nd Street. When you ~1 start over that, you are out of your territory and this is the ~! way they feel. s9

~l Walter Robinson, a Negro who works in the Potrero Hill project 'ir '1 as a community organizer for the Economic Opportunity Council, :1 testified: "[Y]ou have two separate COlllill.unities on Potrero Hill, the :\ ... homeowners and·the project dwellers.;' 40 According- to Mr. Robin-1 son, attempts to communicate with the homeowners have been unsuc-

,. ~ ,cessful, and the.re is little spirit of cooperation between the g'l.mips. ;l' Mrs. Emma Fleming, a white housewife who lived on"Potrero Hill ;~ aU of her life, stated: .'

were no demonstrattons an no J,

Asked whether the person who had contacted her was a real estate 1 Thefe is a lack of communication. Even when we sit ~ around the table we donlt communicate • ••• 41 ~J

man, she replied: . , ' ' ht on tf.rg-Yes He P.Jas securing a ltsttng and he went r1g 't -; • 11 t we ~t out while we could get our money ott •

~!~hc;, 01~e ;hat I recall talked t~ met at ~;m~~~~f:::e:~ his approach was, "We arc relocattng arnt tes ' ,

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';\ The OMI project-involving the Oceanview, Mer~ed'Heights, 1 Ingleside area of San Francisco-is an example of successful in(~-1 racial cooperation in an integrated community. Lee Diamond-a. ~ Negro resident of the area-was asked to compare the successful OMI !

75

interracial project w;.tb. the ·difficulties on potrero Hill, about which he had heard testimony. Mr. Diamond stated that he gathered from hearing the testimony that the white people on potrero Hill:

..• communicate, whether they really mean this or not, communicate to the black community that we are the superior part and. you are the inferior part and it is not going to work.. .. It has to be on a1l equal basis ornot at all.

42

Even where schools are desegregated barriers may remain because o£ white attitudes of superiority. Mrs. Ellen Jackson is a Negro mother in Boston who helped organize "Operation Exodus"~ a private pro­gram to enroll in underutilized white schools Negro children from overcrowded ghetto schO'Jls. She described the treatment given the

Negro children in their new schools: [T]he'treatment some of our children 1'eceiped was really atrocious. This is just the word to use. It was astounding to think that this was Boston and that this could be hap~ pening. Some of the children were physically segregated in the classrooms by being pushed into the back part of the room. Some of the children were kept ill the audi~ torium all day, in the hallways all day. Some of the school doors were actually barred and locked so our children could 1Wt get in. Some of our childten a11d parellts were met with hostile remarks, derogatory remarks, splashed Ott the doors at tM new school . , , and it continued tor quite a few weeks•48

•

Mrs. Jackson testified that this kind of abusive treatment was dis~ continued in a few weeks after "the commotion and the publicity about the program died down." 44 Nevertheless, she said the children still were looked upon as "they" and were not fully accepted in the re-

ceiving 5choo1s/5

In Cleveland, for a number of years a small group of academically gifted Negro children had been permitted to attend the Collinwood High School in order to take courses not given in their neighborhood schools. But when other Negro students wen~ bused to schools in the Collinwood area, white parents of children already in Collinwood, as well as other persons in the neighborhood, organized protests which erupted in violence in March 1965. Negro students were kept in the school while crowds of whites gathered on the steps outside. Buses were brought to the school to transport the students out of the area. Miss Linda Murray, one of the Negro stud.ents attendipg Collinwood, testified: 'We were finally loaded on the buses and rocks and bricks

76

and words and stones were hurled at th b d' broken." 46 e uses an wmdows were

Howard Birdsong, a white student Coll' attitude of the white populati . th at mwood, described the

, on m e area towards Negro students'

The whzte population in the CoIf d . th .f. '~h N mwoo area resellt e ,acl' t at egroes are at Collinwood and •••

. of theelemrotary schools surrounding Colli=~~~d som4~ MISS Murray also testified that the f ul ....

tion impressed upon the Negro studen: ty and the school administra-

• • • that it is a .fw1 'I f linwood 1\.T .' .tll ege or Negroes to attend Col~ • 1. V egro students would 'I

that whell they were in the office 1. ~0?st7t y compl~n or chewing gum one of th h?r etng. ate, for cutttng hangin otler th : e t tngs whtch !uas always trict an~ on setJe~tr head ~as that they were out of the dis­that th .' at o~c~tons several students have told me

e assIstant prtnctpal has said' <lIt ' • , you to attend Collinwood ulhy do "t IS h

a rtlilege for

don't behave you will ledtlP )1 n [Ty]oh"' ~ ave? If yOft 7.' .1. ". ••• IS tS one f th

tmngs tnat haicattsed so m h ' a e the tart of the Negro stud:s ~::~~: and ~esentment on and they are not wanted.48 y don t· feel wanted

She stated that the white s d in the school: tu ents resented the 'preseD.!:e of Negroes

I thi;k you woul1 filld that the student council is a f . I ¥oo represetztatton of the student bod11 and t h atr y mg after the riot a resoluti .r ate meet~ student council b on was presented to reprimand

mem ers who had be h' bricks at Negro stude t. d ell out t rotllmg

d 1 n s an Olle of the promi t

ent eaders in the school 't d . nen stu­were merely exercisin s, 00. ~~p ,and satd these studrots of speech and they sh!~;:;::V; 1'tght~ and their freedom werell't reprimanded and h e reprz:nanded. And they

H' t e resolutzon was defeated 4.0

award B1fdsong testified concernin th . ' •

[W]h '/ d g e source of the resentment'

t e stu rots I know f h CIt' . based th' .. rom teo tnwood area hatle , ttr opmtOns upon their parenti ."

of the resentment comes t'rom th 1. ~o°ptmons. Most I e nOme. n 1965, the School B d f urb of Rochester unanim~arl 0 West Irondequoit, N.Y., a sub-

graders from a ~redomin~~ y endorsed a plan to transport 25 first­dequoit where there wer~ onl~ :r:regro ~~ester school to West Iron-

SIX or etg t Negro children among the

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6,000 students enrolled. The children selected for the program had academic backgrounds comparable to those of the West Irondeqvoit children. After discussion~ with the school district's professional staff and with representatives of parent groups and the clergy, the adminis~ tration announced the program through a newsletter. Earle Helmer, the West Irondequoit School Superintendent, stated: "[T]here wasn)t a great deal of response ..• [for] two weeks and then the roof caved

in": •.• there were charges and demands, charges that the' board acted in secrecy, charges that the board was acting illegally and demanding a referendum; the1'e were peti­tions circulated in ~he communiJ" et.l1d there were letters to the editors and there was an editorial or two in the newspaper . ... 51

Asked why a community such as West Irondequoit had difficulty implementing the program, Mr. Helmer replied:

They wanted to get out of the city for lots of reasons, one of them being educati012. They wanted to set up (1n iso­lated elite type of community and they are going to do everything to protect their feelings in this.

52

Mr. Helmer gave the Commission "a little example of the camouflage and the fog of verbosity that one observes and hears in such a situation":

One individual who was most vociferous about the pro­gram and auended all of the information meetings and many of the baard meetings, said repeatedly from the very beginning, "Well, I'm not opposed to the inner-city chil­dren-I think. it is a splendid idea. I would work. myself to the knuckle. I would work. day and night to develop such a program ••. if only we had been give1~ the opportunity

to vote 011 this decision." Then one night in an information meeting he sort af lost his temper a little bit and I think probably was talking ,without too much feeling perhaps of what he was saying and he said, «(Let me tell you something: if 'You drive a load of manure down Hudson Avenue, that's not a bauquet of roses.JJ Now, I don't know if this man is prejudiced or

not. 58

Notwithstanding the opposition, the West Irondequoit program was implemented and has been expanded.

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•

As Mr. Helmer's testimony S11 'b" of the North and Westoften<'nogtgests, las

d In the white communities

R ,,~ . expresse openl

ev. Londagin described how th y. activities in behalf of open housing: e church membership reacted to his

[W]hen we took strong positions on " percentage of the church me c.ertam

tSSues a large gregation.55 mbershtp deserted the Con-

He described the expressed concern of the people wh I ft Well h fi 0 e : ,t erst response, by and large "W II fl, Negroes, we have man N .' e, we t,\e the agai?st equal rights ~ut e:;: ~~:~~ and (lYe not r~ally ta1kmg about it from th l' has no busmess nothing but the gospel.'~ 5; pu ptt, and we want to hear

Prejudice sometimes is reflected . . . tudes. In Cleveland the b.' In unconSCiOUS patronizing atti-

d usmess community £ 11' ...

emonstrations and whit . . ' 0 owmg CIVIl nghts organized a Businessmen~r InlOttmg ?v1ereoschoo! desegregation in 1964,

f . erraCIa mnnttee C .

airS. One of the organizers John W R' on ommumty Af-"The Negroes on this Conucitt h . b e~vls, told the Commission:

Bias in the North and W t .ee avale e aved magnificently.u 151

d. .' es IS not ways d' . d L . Iscussmg the segregation in Ne k' ~sgUlse .' OUIS .Danzig,

marked at an open 1ileetin ;V~ s publIc housmg proJects, re­Committee: g 0 e New Jersey State Advisory

1 think you need to know and I think . mad .' m my statement I e a very strong and cleareut statement h

are most comfortable with their 58 t ~at people own. George Fink, whose Plumbers Union 1 al h

members among 1,648 members in 1966-:d ad only. four Negro asked by Eugene Patterson Vice Ch . none until 1964-was his personal feelin O's on seg'regationaMrrrmanFink°f the ~mmission, to state

o •• replied' I think etJerybod4' has t I . stay in the place ;here t~:y ~~::;.5~nd everybody should

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[Ill this country has the resources to put a man on the moon. certainly it has the resources to effectively deal with the socioeco­nomic problems that face the minority citizens. Unfortunately, at this time I happen to feel that th~ country docs not have the wt7l to address itself to these problems.1

Many persons echoed this statement of Clifton Jeffers, a Negro attorney and president of the San. Francisco-Ingleside branch of the NAACP.

The Wilt To Act

Throughout the hearings and open meetings Negroes and m~;mbers of other racial and ethnic minorities expressed disillusionment with. the white community and government at all levels and questioned America's comrtlitment to deal with minority problems.2

.

Wilfred Ussery, the National Chairman 'of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), said:

..• I don't see the energy in America where, in;tead of putting 90 cents on the dollar in developing an airliner that will cross the cou11try in three hours, that they put 90 cents on the dollar to buy the home for a poor black persotz in ... Fillmore. * * * [T]he people who run. this country don't have the commitment to deal with problems that affect my community in this country.a

Negro witnesses said they did not believe that white people view ,j Negro problems honestly. Carl Stokes, Negro Ohio State Assembly­

man and winner of the Cleveland Democratic Mayoralty primary in 1967, stated:

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We have in Cleveland developed the ar~ of "accenting,the positive" to the exclusion of remedyzng the negatwes. HoUl difficult it is, but necessary, to advocat~ as a remedy the !t accent of the negative." How else to strzke at and en-deavof.to dispel the deep, almost indigenous false, sen,se o~ security and accomplishment that pervades thzs (:tty?

Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell, pastor of the Union Methodist Church in

Boston, charged: , The city has not listened . •• , Much of the ene?,gy being expended in Boston in th,e atea of, race ,rclattom seems to be concerned with devistng ways zn whzch to say that th~re is no problem. , .. 5

Leaders in the Mexican American and Chinese American com­munities who testified at Commission hearings questioned ,the ~om­mitment of America to deal effectively with ~e p~ob1~~s of,Its millor­ity citizens, and contended that American SOClety IS cns~s-or:ented and will deal widl racial problems only when they erupt,1O v101

en,t con­

fl;'ct. Herman Gallegos, a Mexican American commumty leader 1U San

F.mncisco, testified: I regret to say that it appears that we have entered an era whete we are prepared to spend money f~r riots, to offset riots or to deal with the aftermath of rtots but ~re ~ot doing anything to hel? people ~o build st1fong ~amtly Me; to secure their educatton to whtch they are entttled under

the law. , .. 6

Felipe Ortiz, Southern Vice President of the Mexica~ A~erican Political Association, remarked at a meeting of the Califorma State

Advisory COlpmittee: It is a fact that last year in San Francisco, after the Negro uprising 700 positions [in the Post Office] were cr~ated to pacify and alleviate the p:~blems ,of :mpl~ym:l1t m the Negro community, The Ctvzl Sel'V1Ce exammattOllS t~ere waived in the mentioned case. Yet when the Mexlcan American organizations request tha~ t~e s{l~e be done for the Mexican American, the admtntstratton refu~ed to acknowledge that the Mexican American communzty was faced with the same problems in employment. Will we have to- burn some buildings to obtain justice

from our Government? 7

82

Rev. L~ Jack Won~, who testified about problems of the Chinese commuruty m San FranCISCO, expressed a similar view:

[1]11 th~s part~cular society today there seems to be a kind of manta, a ktnd of an attitude that spreads arou1Jd until a g~~up of people produces a not, the country and the poltttcal structure am ... ing its officials do not take a close look and give enough attention or ... do anytJ.tiftg about a particular problem . .. ,8

, Loss of, faith ?mo~g minority citizens in America's commitlnent to deal WIth theIr gnevances is reRected in testimony indicating im­patience with "dialogues," studies and reports.

Edward Becks, a Negro civil rights leader who lives and works in East Palo Alto, observed:

This question of creating a dialogue seems to be almost completely out of (:ontext, because this is where we were :0 years ago, you know, trying to create this dialogue and tt seems that maybe we were more successful at this 20 ~ears ago than w,e are today, and 1 think that many people ~n the commumty today .iust do not visualize any effort tn connecting ourseltles with the greater community as being very serious.o

Linda Murray said:

I personally am notrfally interested right now in human relations and huma12 dialogues between the races . •.. What 1 am interested in now, is in seeing that everybody can eat and that they can get clothes and a decem educa­tion and this is what we need to be working on aud not dialogue groups.l0

Some witnesses questioned the motives of people conducting sur­veys and studies, especially those who were termed "professional ~ustlers"-studen~s, p~ofessors or government officials who spend vary­mg, amo~ts of tune m slums and then write books or reports about thelr expenences. Mr. Luster commented:

Weare comtautl,), having tl~e professional hustle off of our ghettos and we are tired of it, and I think this is where the govemr,(lent has wasted millions and millions of dol-

.. la~s and h~' continued to do this and the people never get thts money. And the only thing we get is a tremendous amount of beautiful reports that are not even read:ll

83

d h th hi Community receives any assistance from Stan-

Aske weer s B k r d' fo d University in solving its school problems, Mr. ec s rep le .

r 1 ],' . t r noses [W]e do get a lot of people • •• oo""ng m"o o~ , ears and eyes and listening to us and tape recordmg wh~ we say and we never see the benefit of what they ~o, .' ..

d th Commission's heanng m Oakland: Mr. Comfort commente on e Like it's nice of you ladies and gentlemen to come d?wn and set up the Civil Rights Commission and the heann,gs, but it's too bad you don't have the pOUler to do, anythm~ b t 't But you put in more statistics and that tS W her~ It

a ou yt. pend more mone1/ on statistics than on solvmg goes. ou s J

the problem.is

• ' d , . Coordinator of the Youth Trammg an

John Serrato, Co~m:mLlty Angeles County told the California State Employment ProJect ill os ' Advisory Committee: , '

I seriously doubt, ladies and gentlemen, that you re go~ng to do a damn thing fM us. That's right! Now, you lust exami11e your own conscience, because whe11 you leav~ h' place with the exception of one or two here otJ thIS

t zs I , ' . 't d wn and panel, you're going to smoke your bzg ctgar, S1 0 lk d t drink our coffee and say, "Well, yeah, we sure ta e. 0

those ~exicans oper there." But that's going to end nght

there. * * *

h F . E1nployment Practice Commission We've gone to t e mr , , with complaints. They've told us, (lYes, we re g~m~ ~o look into it." Man! They must think the complamt tS m Mars because they've been looking for as long as four years

d 1-:1 and nothing has happene yet. , . )

'n of the ComlU1SS1on s New At the conclusion of an o~en ~e~ g Y k City the committee

York State Advisory ComIDlttee m ew or , .

chairman observed: " ','

[T1 he Negra. (;'ommunity regards any new mves~t~at~onsd) " " h ". if not hosttltty) L'ln meetings, or hearmgs wzt cymctsmJ

,. t' .with a disheartening lack of tait~ thfa: such a~:::i::ath;~ vestigations will be mo;'e meamn~ u or pr~5 those which have bee'll conducted m the past.

Militancy in Minority Communlties

Many witnesses testified about increasing militancy among Negro youth.16 James Richards told the Commission:

They [Negro youth] can't s£t back and believe everything they've been told that things are going to get bcner be~ cause· things aren't getting hetter . .y hings are getting worse and children that grew up in a poor area in this generation and getting more sophisticated of what is going on around them [}md they] are going to let you k 11 now • .••

Clifton Jeffers explained that Negro youth are

• > • developing attitudes which seem to say: "That if this society is such that 1 cannot obtain gainful employment, then 1 am inclined to pursue that course of action which, in my opinion) will contribute to a downfall, a deteriora­tion, a destruction of that society that denies me the opportunity of employment/' 1 think, we find that expressed in a number of areas in increasing numbers. We note the formation of varied and numerous black nationalist oriented organizations and I think that is a reflection; an outgrowth of the frustration that the young people face today.18

Asked if a significant number of people share this feeling) Mr. Jeffers replied: "I think there is a significant group of people who feel that way and, unfortunately, I think the numbers are growing." 19

Speaking of the militancy and impatience of Spanish youth, Mr; Gallegos said: "The younger people are becoming very impatient with those of us who are somehow looked upon as leaders by the estab­lishment, because we have been unable to bring about changes fast enough." 20 The militancy and alienation of many members of the Mexican American community was made very apparent at the Com~ mission hearing in San Francisco. Several witnesses subpenaed to appear before the Commission refused to testify and walked out of the hearing in protest against policies of the Federal Government.

Like Mr. Jeffers, other witnesses interpreted the new militancy in minority commul1ities as an outgrowth of disillusionment and frustration. Wilfred Ussery said: .

. . . I have to say that [increased militancy] comes out of a sense of awareness that the usual kinds of tools that one has dealt with are inadequate to deal WIth the problem.

85

,

i

It would also stem from recognizing that most of the defi­nitiofts of the problem that we hatJe dealt with in the past really hatJe been quite superficial. They have not been answers or stakiJ~g out of problems which really pro­vided or would provide, even if we were successful, an­swers for masses of black people i1t this COU1Jtry.21

Robert Jacobs, a Negro witness in San Francisco, said that the black nationalists were telling Negroes they cannot rely upon white liberals to correct unjust conditions:

Now, what black nationalist groups ewe telling them is that ((Look, baby, nobody is going to help you but your­self, and what you had better do, you had better realize that with all the liberals in the world that you still have these conditions that you had when you mer! these liberals, and until you can do something about it for yourself, they wt'll be here." 22

Earle Williams said that Negroes were attempting to organize and control their own lives:

Itt other words, we are not sitting back any more and wa~ting on other people to dictate our lives. Weare try­ing to organize ourselves where we have something to say about our oUJn lives . •.. 28

Mr. Becks explained what the concept of "black power" meant for people living in the heavily Negro area of East Palo Alto, a com­munity isolated from surrounding white !COmmunities (despite at­tempts by Negro leaders for annexation) and poorly governed by the county:

86

I think the people are saying two thh~gs. They are saying that if you-you can call it Black Powl~r, if you will, or you can call it whatever you wish, but Irhey are saying that it we mean integration when we .lay it, then it seems that the pOUlers that be should be t1ble to do something that is positive in the direction to see that integration becomes a fait accompli. NoUJ on the other hand, if you do not mean integration and you mean segreg~)tion becausl~ this is wllat we are gettitlg, then possibly fomething should be done on the other hand to .see that these segre'gated people can con­trol the schools and the other industries, et cetera, that exist in that segregated area.24

...• , .

"

',;

,;- ,( :-~f. ~ -.

• "-_. ~_E ~ ...

it.

~:~, " .. '

, >

" : f ..

~ -..~: " 'JoE ~ 1:.;,::

:·7~· ~,-'\, , to1·lf.

i '! !

Asked whether the people in East Palo Aito were becoming dis­illusioned about the likelihood of creating an integrated society, Mr. Becks replied: "I don't think many people in the East Palo Alto area visualize anything like an integrated society." 25

A young Negro militant, Earl Anthony, testified that instead of going into the black communities, white people should "fight the racism in their own areas, because this is where the major battle is, in the white communities, rather than in the black communities." 26

. Walter Robinson said he thought "the black people in this country have been trying for the past 400 or so years to achieve their goals within the democratic process, and I think there is a lot of disagree­ment on how well they hav'e succeeded." 27 He said:

We would like to be able to proceed along the established democratic lines for change if this is possible, but if this is not possible, the1l we will have to do whatever is nec­essary to make these changes.28

Mr. Comfort warned white people not to ask "why" when dlis-orders erupted in the cities:

So when thi1zgs, blow in the city people sit back and want to know why, and all the time we're telling you why.29

Robert Jacobs thought that white people I'are going to have to start looking at these people as human beings, rather than Negroes .... They are going to have to realize that this is not just a Potrero Hill problem or a Negro problem. They are going to have to realize thi:s is an American citizen's problem. This is an American social ill and some­thing has to be done about it, and unless we find some effective means of communicating, breaking down these emotional walls that we have over there, we haven't seen half the problems we are going to have." 80

87

Conclusion

Although few white Americans have had first hand contact with Negro slums or Mexican American "barrios/' in recent months they have become generally familiar with the tangible £actsof ghetto life. They have read about or been made aware of the meanness of the sur~ roundings and the poverty-the deteriorated housing, the rats, the unemployment, the vice and crime. What is not visible to the eye and what apparently is not generally understood is the feeling of many Negro ghetto residents that they live in a "trap" from which they cannot escape. The life of the slum dweller-physically hare-is char­acterized by frustration, despair and hopelessness. He has a sense of powerlessness and a feeling of inability to communicate his own prob­lems, control his own destiny or influence persons in positions of authority.

For many ghetto residents, the symbol of ~;lhite authority is the policeman, who, in their view, has often not provided protection for citizens within the ghetto, does not treat them wit.h dignity and respect and views his role as that of keeping Negroes "in line" on behalf of the white community. In the view of ghetto residents the attitude of local government is exemplified by the inadequacy of sanitation services, and by the absence of needed health and recreational facilities and the transportation services that would make them accessible. The symbols of the white business community are the merchant who sells inferior merchandise or who exploits the economic dependence of Negroes by providing credit at exorbitant rates, and the absentee landlord who reduces services and allows property to deteriorate once Negroes be­come tenants.

It would be reassuring to conclude that the situation of Negroes in the slums is not dissimiliar to that of past generations of American immigrants who lived in ghettos but were able to leave. Many white Americans have drawn this conclusion and have expressed the belief that Negroes themselves are responsible for their condition and that all that is required to escape is personal effort. But the analogy is mis­leading and dangerous. Negroes are not recent immigrants to our shores but Americans or long standing. They were oppressed not by

89 277-9170-67-7

< •

t 49 ,,4--- ~ !S au. ;, . 3._... "_,.,Z,~, '" ,.. ..

, , ~

foreign governments but by a system of slavery supP?rted ?y this gov­ernment and its people. The legacy of slavery cont~nu~s 1? ~e form of racial segregation (de facto if no longer legal!, dlscnmmatlO,n and prejudice. Escape from the ghetto for any group IS much mor~ difficult in the America of the 1960's than it was one or two generatlons ago. Society has become more complex, and unskilled employment or small business enterprises no longer are meaningful.first st~ps up the ~ad~er.

These factors-the demands of a technologlcal socIety, and dlscn~­ination and prejudice, facilitated by the visibility of the N~groes' skm color-have been translated into barriers far more formIdable than those which were faced by the Irish, the Italians) the Poles or the Jews

in this country. , The traditional exits from ghetto life have been blocked, PublIc edu-

cation long has been viewed as a means to provide the Nation:s youth with skills which would enable them to escape poverty and Jom the mainstream of society. But most Negro youngsters are in overcrowded and inadequate schools which are, as a practical matter, segr~gated by race and by class, and which are stigmatized by the commumty. They have little or no contact with more advantaged students and they are outside the informal channels that lead to skilled employn;ent. They frequently are taught by teachers who are less able or expenenced and who expect less of them. Contrary to .widesp!'ead belief, recent Federal efforts to make available more aid to mner-clty schools have not appre­dabl y affected the disparity between the resources of these schools and those of other schools witllin the city and better financed subur-

ban systems. . ' Many Negro youths, having failed to receIve a meanmgful edu~a-

tional opportunity, at an early age an~ ~it~out. the. l1c~essary skIlls enter a labor market in which racial dIscnmmatlon IS st11~ preval~nt. Government efforts to provide training have been small m. relatiOn­ship to the need and frequently have been poorly coordmated or misdirected. Entry of Negroes into the construction trades-one of the few remaining fields of well~paid emplqyment that .does not. re­quire extensive formal education-still is blocked by ~n~o~ practlces of discrimination which have not been eliminated by clVll fights laws

\ I r

I I' I ~ Ii I

II 11 Ii I~ I ~ ! i 1 11 I',

1. and governmental action. . A further problem arises from the fact that. employment. oppor~u- ~

nities in private industry are Ulcreasingly movmg from the 1l1ner-:l~Y oj

into the suburbs, and beyond. Though jobs in private industry a~d in ·,1

public service are growing rapidly in the ~uburbs, ~ese are often mac- 1 cessible to Negroes because of the housmg practices of gove:n~ent l

and the housing industry. Despite its deciared goal of proVIdIng a 1

90

I

1 'I I.~

decent home in a suitable living environment for all American fam­ilies, the Federal Government has not met the housing needs of the great majority of low and moderate income families and has often acquiesced in the decisions of local authorities to locate publicly assisted housing only in tightly restricted areas of the ghetto. Moreover the discriminatory p:actices of real estate brokers, builders, and mort~age lenders, unrestramed by any effective Government regulation, continue to confine Negroes of all income levels to ghetto areas and to restrict the housing market in ways which facilitate exploitation.

The response of Government to deprivation and discrimination has raised expectations, but has too often been characterized by an inade­quate commitment of resources and by acquiescence in, or failure to deal effectively with, practices of segregation and confinement. In addition, the goals of social and economic legislation often have been thwarted by self-defeating rules and regulations. Thus, for example, most Negro citizens would welcome welfare programs which offered not a "dole," but assistance which would achieve the program's stated purpose-to promote economic independence and family stability. Instead, welfare programs have been devised and administered in a m~n.ner whi.c~ tends to break up families 2nd perpetuate dependency. CrItIcal deCISions are often made by officials far removed from the scene and the persons most intimately involved are generally not per~ mitted to participate in planning their own affairs and futures.

Underlying these private and public actions have been attitudes within the ,,:hite majority-attitudes based on fear, on racial prejudice, and on a desrre for status. While many of these attitudes are hot overtly expressed, they are nonetheless real and effective. They have been ac­companied by a lack of concern for and a failure to become involved in the problems of the slums.

It is in the context of great frustrations, of laws and programs which promise but do not deliver, of continued deprivation, discrimination and prejudice in a society increasingly prosperous, that the increasing alienation and the disorders of recent months must be viewed. Despite the great destructiveness of recent urban riots, mainly to people and property in the ghetto itself, relatively few people have been involved. But the general public should come to understand that the riots are only the violent manifestations of feelings of anger and despair which are much more widely shared. Reacting to continued rejection and to doors which do not open even after years of patient waiting, increasing numbers of Negro citizens are rejecting white America. The failure of State, local and Federal governments to respond to the efforts of moderate Negro leaders is causing in.creasing numbers pf Negroes to

91

I

','" "*'!f"'* 4. ..

despair of moderate methods and of moderate leadership and to favor

a separatist course. The expressions of these feelings, often lumped together under the

heading of "black power," are varied. Some expressions, particularly those which help to build a sense of dignity and pride and which stimulate community participation, may be constructive; others, such as riots or violence, can only be destructive of what little has been achieved so far. But even the most constructive efforts by Negroes are not likely to reduce materially the deeply held ~ee1ings of frustration and anger, or to improve the sad state of race relations in this country, until Americans generally make a massive commitment to strike at the underlying causes-poverty and segregation.

The problems of our cities and the people who live in them will not be resolved by a search for culprits or conspirators, or for solutions which do not cost money or effort. Nor can it justly be argued that remedies for the discrimination suffered by the millions of Americans who live in slum ghettos should be deferred on the ground that to do otherwise would be to reward violence. Violators of the law must be punished. But it would be a cruel paradox if after years of failing to reward patience or redress injustice, we were to use such violations by a few as an excuse for continued inaction on the problems which affect so many, and involve us all.

The problems of race and poverty which we face today cannot be resolved unless their solutions are made the Nation's first priority. The Nation may continue to struggle with the problems which inevitably arise when we are divided into separate, unequal and alien groups­either torn by violence or co-existing in an uneasy peace purchased at the cost of repressive action. Or we can all together make the com­mitment which will redeem our promises and ideals by opening the doors of the ghetto so that Negroes and other minority groups can become full participants in American society, with a truly equal op-

portunity for all.

92

Footnotes

'Footnotes to Chapter 1.

1 Heating B t h US e are t e "Commission a C' 'z R' h May 1-3, 1967, and Oakland, Calif" Ma :!-6 t;~67 tg ts, San F1:ancisco, ,Calif" Bay Area Heating]. y, at 284 (heremafter CIted as

2/d. at 283-84, 8 I~. at 284. Piri Thomas, a Puerto Ric th ",

desc1'lbed the reaction of Puerto R' athn a,u . or :vho hves m East Harlem, lcan you notmg m East Harlem'

On l05th Street, in one of the hi ele ar • Ricans smash all the front w' d g , p tlnent stores, 1 saw two young Puerto

, 10 o\Vs 10 making t methodically, with sticks in their h d' th no a tempt to loot, but rather, policeman's night stick smash with a~f t~ , ~t we~ longer by three feet than the then stanel inside the ~ore and look out :~r thury

t e ~e~ds of the, mannequins and we are not mannequins, we are human b' e ~r;;~ aT~ost as if to say, 'World, 1967, at 76, col. 4-5. emgs. " tines Magazine, Aug, 13,

"Massachusetts State Advisor Com . Rights, The Voice of the Ghett/ mlttee to the U.S. Commission on Civil 7 (1967) [hereinafter cited as voRz'ceporft °hn TGtlJho Boston NeiglJbol'hood Meetil1gs

5 P' ~ 0 t e T etto] I'oceedzngs Before the Indiana State Ad . . ,

mission ?n CiVil Rights ill Gary, Ind., Feb 8 ~~~l Com1hnttte,e to the .U, S. Com­Transcrzpt]. 'J at 42 [ eremafter CIted as Gary

a /d. at 41-42. 7 For a study of the "patholo f h Dark Ghetto (1965) an al . gy f ~I t e Negro ghetto," see Kenneth B. Clark,

confined to depressed are: a;~~'~h , .. what hahPpens to human beings who are

bU' .. ose access to t e normal ch If'

rna lty and opportunity is block d" (I d' anne s 0 economIC D CI k

' . e ntx'o uctlOn to an Epil ") r. . ar S VIew of the Ne ro h tt ( ogue, p. XXll •

reflects that of witnesses quot:d it ~is °ch:s tec~~!;{ed . tf . 'hit~ urba~ slums)

be closely confined to the pervasiv 1 p r. f e Negl I belteves hunself to is"-while white poor persons b:1i~: s~~~s ~ the gh:~t?, and in f~ct usually escape from the slums" (id) Th £ ey. can rISe economIcally and urban areas or of the N ' " ere ore, accordmg to Dr. Clark, studies of of the Negro ghetto. egro m general do not necessarily cast light on the problems

8 Bay Area Hearing at 53. °Gar T . rie ;ansC1

d zPtlt at 29. ?ther~ als~ have characterized ghettos as traps:

epen en y poor lD Califorma tend ' . I b :verty, ~o~ccntrated among definable grou;~~~sl~~~a:~d ;o:a::~esin their th:::: :;::}lat the ~alysts refer t~ liS th~ "Trap Ghetto," Distinguish:do~!:

Igrant g ctt/)< of Amencan Cities by its "closed circle" character.

93 .'.

r· :;;:::. ~~ ~-. -~" I

it is described (as] "Growing concentrations of depressed immigrants to the city who are caught in a closed circle formed by low economic status, low educational status, low levels of employment opportunity and limited social contact. The sp'u'al upward and outward necessarily becomes a trickling affair." California Welfare Study Commission, Filial Report 127 (1963).

See also Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Metropolitan America: Challenge to Federalism, a study submitted by the Commission to the Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee of the Committee on Govern­ment Operations, 89th Cong., 2d Sess. 4 (1966) for a discussion of the self-

reinforcing character of Negro ghettos. 10 Gary Transcript at 29. George and Eunice Grier in Equality and Beyond

45-46 (1966) pointed out that the geographical concentration of persons who have been denied equal opportunity intensifies the effect of such denials:

It is not easy to eliminate the accumulated ill effects of denying equal opportunity to Negroes in the areas of education and work. It is even harder to deal with such problems when their victl.n5 are so concentrated geographically that the resulting demoralization and sodal difficulties become self-reinforcing ••••

11 Voice of the Ghetto at 6. 12 The hopelessness of many slum residents who are unemployed and on wel-

fare was discussed in The California Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots report, Violence in the City-An End Or A Beginnillg? 38 (1965) [here-

inafter cited as McCone Commission Report]: Many witnesses have described to us, dramatically and we believe honestly, the overwhelming hopelessness that comes when a man's efforts to find a job come to naught. Invariably, there is despair and a deep resentment of a society which he feels has turned its bac!, upon him. Welfare does not change this. It provides the necessities of life, but adds nothing to a man's stature, nor relieves the frustrations that grow. In short, the price for public assistance 1S loss of human dignity.

18 Bay Area Hearing at 51. HId. at 41. 115 Bay Area Hearing at 227. 16 The isolation of the poor, particularly of Negro poor, was noted by the Cali-

fornia Welfare Study Commission: The modern ghetto effectively cuts oft its inhabitants from participation in the society around them. When it i5 a color ghetto as well, the cutting off is that much more severe. Since the aspirations of ghetto dweJ1ers are, by and large, the same as those of the rest of society, they are fully conscious of having been cut off. Since their natural capacities and talents are, man for man, the same as those of the rest of society, they are bitter. It is inevitable, therefore, that a sense of alienation is bred which weakens any sense of "belonging" to the larger com­munity. California Welfare Study Commission, stlpra note 9 at 129.

11 Voice of the Ghetto at 8. le Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc., Youth in the Ghetto:.A Study

of the Consequences of PotlJerlessness and a Blueprint for Change (1964) has a chapter at 313-350, entitled "Cries of Harlem," a compilation of statements by residents of that ghetto. The authors of the report summarize that chapter: "The statistical facts about Central Harlem present a picture of despair, hopelessness, and futility. These facts have been known for ~ long time. What the bare facts about life i.n Harlem fail to reveal, however, are the human anguish and sense of

powerlessness that lie beMnd them." 1.1l Voice of the Ghetto at 5.

94

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20 Bay Area Hearing at 469-70. The Tennes . the U.S. Commission on Civil RI'ght .. see State AdVISOry Committee to . h s lU Its report Ho' d U In t e Nashville-Davidson County Met r usmg an rban RenetIJa/ cited as Tennessee Housing Report] £o~'o:~ta~, A~ea 32 (1967) [hereinafter hoods are inadequately represented on ~ ;t reSIdents of ~ffected neighbor­alter the conditions of their neighborh d" e oards or agenCIes authorized to

In Cleveland, Rev. Younger, speak:g :£ the "managed life of th " On every hand the poor-both as ind' 'd ' e poor, stated: not his OwJl. This is true of 010 t f IV~ ~al and as neIghborhood-finds his life but for the poor, it comes to th~ °oi~:::: mterd:pendent relationships as we live, This is why, by the W3" the poP f at nothmg you can do can be your own

th . JI or Ie use to mov 't bl' h' •

ere the drrector has a pas<key and • e m 0 pu Ie ousmg because their own. Ma,y I say that this is true oean come m. so even their bedroom is not syste~ and night raids. What can we fd;;~~~~dchents too, t?rough the inspector prOVIde a degree of freedom? H . B managed life for the poor and Right~, Cleveland, Ohio, April 1_;a~;~6 eta;;; thht' U:S. Com~l/'.tsion 01/ Civil Heanng1. ' at [ eremafter cited as Cleveland

21 Bay AT'ec Hearing at 470 221 • 23 Cleveland Hearing at 250.

Bay Area Hearing at 276-77 24Id. at 444. • 25 !d. at 449. 26 Cleveland Hearing at 283. 211d. at 294-95. 28 Cleveland Hearing at 283 Th . fl

dren was noted in the McCon~ Coe lU .ue.nceRof parental unemployment on chil-o mmlSS,fon eport at 38-39.

Thus, a cham reaction takes place The d . em,ployed parent is passed down t'th . espaIr and disillusionment of the un-present and the parent's frustration e ~hl~d~? The example of failure is vividly school for what?" one youngster s~id ~: US.)3 Its become the children's. ("00 to

Another author described the same ph Th child enomenon more dramatically: e ren of these disillusioned col d .

northern cities] inherited the total I t o~e thP?oneers [migrants from the south to anger. To add to their misery the;: d l~rr parents-thl! disappointments, the does one run to when he's ~lr d ~ ~tle hope of deliverance. For where Manchild ill the Promised Land vii~a(I~6~n) e promised land? Claude Brown,

~ . Cleveland Hearing at 354.

80 Gary T . , ranscnpt at 74. Mary Frances Greene dOl . ~hlldren: Grouling Up in the Slums 81 an r etta Ryan lU The School III a Harlem public school on th dd' (~96th5) .quot~ the comments of children

e a ICts lU ell' neighborhood'

About ten hangs out on m block M • live on the first Hoor my ~om go; y ~uper keep them moving in our hall We call in soft through the keyhole wha po ce lock on our door. But it's scary. They

en my mom be out.

My ~other don't answer that door at ni ht ' open It. And she keeps that can of lye by ~e d!~~ says Whos there? but don't

In The Challenge of Crime in a Free S . sian on Law Enforcement and O~':ty, a.Report by the President's Commis-after cited as Challenge] the £o:dIX?lUlstraoon of Justice 62 (1967) [herein­Were made by children who lived' oWl lUg .statements about their neighb~rhoods

lU s UU1S.

"There are a whol 1 0

who drink and la~ :~:~~Il::r~l~l!~ng arJ~nbd dback in the alley there. Men

_OJ! sm a. Cook stuff mG</bt:. Chase

95

(13 'd) "When I first started living around here it was really

••••• yearol ' I . sht you h sed to it now. Been here 2 years. Peop e gettIng 0

bad, but 1 ave gotten u ettin hurt. People getting beat up " • • Gee, there's and stuff. Lots of people g g . II h t' ..... jO" (14 year old boy).

£ • I und here You see it ate une a lot 0 • ViO ence aro , • I be hitting each other, fighting next door. Then "Sometime where I live at peop e I" " " .. (15 year old boy). when they stop fighting then you can get some seep .

b H lem. school children on crime in their area, ill Jeremy See also, essays Y ark S 1 l Crisis" in The U,.ban School Crisis 9-10 (1966). Larner, "The New Yor c 100

81 Cleveland Hea!'ing at4631-4' 4 Sl'~;larly in The School Children supra note

82 G y T,.anscrzpt at • uu , k l' 30 at 1~, a child living in Harlem described his mother's struggle to eep up 115

~F: d ~~ th . don't have time to cook for us, Brother and me l,xes some m. .

~~ :~e ;od care of us, Lays out my outfit every night. A~d ,~hen I get worrym about my life and everything she says, "Let me do t!l(J worrym.

33 Cleveland Hearing at 352. M Id.at347. <'5 Bay Area Hea,.ingat 409.

Footnotes to Chapter 2.

1 Gary Transcript at 26. . b 2 The condition of housing in urb~ areas wa~ di~cussed l~ ~o:~~~e:uo~

mitted to the Subcommittee on Ex.ecuttvl! R~or~an~:pt:r~;!n~ of Housing and Governmental Operations by the Secretary oj. t e

Urban Development: , 1" 'h s which by any reasonable

Ab t 4 million urban families are sull lVlng in ouse ." Th ou f U t minimum requirements of decency. esc

standard acceptable today" a to ~~~ . d d 0 which lack a ,private toilet or are the urban homes which are . I apl ate d ~ use becomes substandard if too private bath or hot running ~ater: E;en ~::vail~ble facilities, There are many many ,geoplc are crowded 1Oto ~t, or h· rcent or more of the families

" • t of our central ClUes w ere 40 pe £ ' sectlons,1O mos

d h ' Federal Role in Urball Affairs, Heltrings Dc orc me

are dellied goo OUS\fl~. "£ the Senate Committee on Govern-Subcommittee on ExecuUve ReorgamzaUon 0 t 1 . t 20 thereinafter ment Operations, 89th Cong" 2d ~ess, (1966) App. to P • a cited as Wbicot/ Subcommittee Heal'lIlgs] , ,

d and the lack Rashi Fein in an article in Daedalus discussed overcrow mg

of basic sanitary facilities in housing occupied by Negroes:

96

, 'h d er 15 persons per room (down In 1960, 14 perc~nt of nonwhite umts t\ ~vmor~ than one person per fOOm from 23 percent 10 1940), and 28 percen a bl 1960 figures for white units (down from 40 percent in 1940). Butscompara e om :,Inu 10 percent with

nl 2 t w'th morc than 1. persons per ro • were Q Y percen I Al d ' 1940 the white child was c,\oing IllS more than one pel'son per room. re~ , y 10 Ne ro child faced twenty homework under less crowded cond,mons than ~urh d gmore than 1.5 persons years later. Only 7.5 percent of white househol s a in 1940-per room arid only 18 percent had more than oile person per room

;. r , * t, , .\

standards considerably bettcr than nonwhites had achieved II full two decades later •

" " If

But the situation is made worse by the quality of what is overcrowded, In 1960, 30 percent of housing units occupied by nonwhites lacked bathtubs or showers-a situation true for only 12 percent of all dwelling units (including vacant ones). Forty-one percent of nonwhite units had no bathrooms (or had shared ones), but this was the case in only 12 percent of all dwelling units, Sixty­nve percent of nonwhite housing units had hot and cold piped water inside the structure, but 87 percent of all units did. A full one-fifth of nonwhite units had no piped water inside the structure, a situation true for only 7 percent of all units. Finally, while 90 percent of all units had flush toilets, this was true for only 75 percent of nonwhite occupied units. Rashi Fein, "An Economic and Social Profile of the Negro American," 94 Daedaltls 836 (Fall 1965).

3 Vot'ce of tile Ghetto at 16. 1 Cleveland Heal'itlg at 112. 5 Id. at 115-17. Old. at 121. 7 Commission staff memorandum of inspection of Cleveland Housing Division

Files, Feb. 15, 1966, Commission Cleveland Hearing File. S See George Sternlieb, Tile Tenement Landlord, Chapter 6, "Who Owns the

Slums? A Profile" (1966), for a discussion of ownership of slum properties in Newark, N.J., based on a study conducted by the author and financed by the Federal Housing Administration. The author is Professor and Director of the Research Center in the RULgers Graduate School of Business Administration.

o CletJeland Hearing at 29-30. 10 ld. at 109. See also George and Eunice Grier, Eqttality and Beyond 32

(1966): "Historically, the restriction and concentration of racial minorities into limited neighborhoods has been a prime cause of housing blight. . .. Because exploitation flourishes wherever people are denied free choice, segregated resi­dential patterns also tend to contribute to the exacting of excessive prices for inferior housing, and to faltering maintenance as wcll. This has been especially true for rental units: landlords in Negro areas have long been notorious for practicing 'slumlordism' in its most extreme formS." For the view that sub­standard housing conditions in slum areas initially are created by overcrowded use and lack of maintenance by landlords, see Albert C. Ettinger, l'Color Differentials in Housing Conditions and Residential Patterns," 4 Intergroup Relations 240 (1965).

11 Clevcland Hearing at 38. .l2Id.at37. 13Id. See also Sternlieb supra note 8, at 35-36: "Certainly one of the most

harmful elements in the slums of Newark is the prevalence of vacant and/or abandoned parcels. In the course of the field study, and later intt:fviewing, no less than six.teen out of a total of five hunqred six.ty-six. parcels in the random sample fitted this category. They were either burnt out, boarded up, or in some cases basically vacant and open to the wind and the derelicts of the neighborhood. Each of these parcels was revisited six months after having been observed. No less than twelve were still in the same condition as had been observed initially. Each of these parcels serves as a source of contamination for the entire neighborhood.

97

... !IJ

I'

While the city in theory has a policy of requiring that vacant parcels be cleared off the land, this is obviously far from the usual practice. In a number of cases, parcels were observed that had been vacant, according to neighbors, for upwards of three years .... Their effect on the human environment is most deleterious."

14 Cleveland Hem·ing at 183-84. 1.6 1d. at 190. Another reason for the decision to suspend code enforcement in

Cleveland, according to James Friedman, Commissioner, Division of Slum Clear­ance and Blight Control, was "that if active code enforcement were to be carried out, this might e-"entually interfere with bringing about rehabilitation to stand. ards that were higher than the code enforcement program." ld. at 183-84.

The Commission heard testimony in Oakland that in Richmond, Calif., the city government had actively discouraged home improvements in an area sched­uled for renewal in order to lower acquisition cOots. William R. Brown, who owned property in Richmond, testified:

Well, the Hensley Tract is a neighborhood just south of North Richmond and it was occupied by aU Negro ,people. The city of Richmond declared dlat [tract] about 12 years ago as a slum district scheduled for redevelopment for industrial purposes.

Now, for between 9 and 10 years they did nodling about this. They refused to issue the people permits for dle improvement of their homes. They discouraged them from maintaining their homes telling them "You can go and paint if you want to pa.int, but we may buy it next month, and we will tell ),ou now if it costs you $300 for painting you won't get $300 back." So of course no one did much maintaining of dleir property. Bay Area Hearil/g at 562-63.

See also Connecticut State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Housitlg Codes and Their Enforcement in Six Connecuticut Cities (1967).

10 Cleveland Hearing at 195. 11 Dean Swartzell, Regional Director of Urban Renewal for the Department

of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), testified that he was unaware of the city's policy to suspend enforcement of the housing code in urban renewal areas.ld.

1.8 The deterioration was not caused by ~ lack of funds. The Federal Govern­ment provided the city with more than $55 million in urban renewal funds in 1955-more money than any other city had received-yet ten years later the city had more than $40 million unexpended with nothing to show for the $15 million spent except acres of desolation. Mr. Swartzell testified that he knew that "there had been quite an input of money and dle production vis-a-vis the money is bad." Cleveland Hearing at 196. In January, 1967-many months after this testimony had been brought to the attention of the Department of Housing and Urban Development-an application for an increase in urban renewal funds for the University-Euclid project in Cleveland was refused. Letter from Secretary Robert C. Weaver to Ralph Locher, Mayor of Cleveland, Jan. 16, 1967.

~9 Cleveland Hearing at 38. " ~ For example, in Cleveland all of the rental units listed by the urban renewal

authorities during December, 1965, and January, 1966, were located on the east side of Cleveland in predominandy Negro areas. Nearly half the Negro families who relocated from University-Euclid moved to census tracts which were mor.e than 90 percent Negro. Almost an equal number moved to census tracts which

98

j

-~----~-----------,--.

were between 50 and 90 percent Ne ro 0 I 20 . neigh~orhoods. Cleveland Hearing !t i74~!s J p~rcent relocated. to non-Negro FranCISco's Redevelopment Authorit dre . ~stJ~ He~man, DIrector of San San Francisco: y, w a SlIIlllar pIcture of relocation in

San Francisco need not be proud of its record on h . placed families-four out of five f h' h ow It has rehoused its dis­map showing where these familiesoha~ Ie are nonwhite. Look at the relocation tion of them just over the borders of thee go:: and you .find the greatest concentra­designated as such by the Board f S pr ,lect area, In the very slums that were improved-a decade ago "A ROt upcrvlsors as blighted--and they have not The U,'ball COllditioll 1io (Lco:~~ JO~ Uhrb

l and Renewal in the United States,"

• U ,e • 1963). In January-February 1963 the Com . . ,

Committee interviewed '351 fa' '1' h mISSIon s Connecticut State Advisory H £ mIles w 0 recently had rei t d' th "

art ord, New Haven) Bridgeport, Norwalk and ?C~ e In e CItIes of had urban redevelopment projects in the f 11 f 1 New Bntam. These .five cities its study of family relocation Th C ~ 0 f 962 when the Committee initiated

. e ommlttee ound that: The pattern of racial composition £ • hb changed much more for white thar~ f ne~ orhoods before and after relocation Bed from racially mixed neighb h or

d ,;gro rel?cated families. Whites in fact

white or mostly white in composi~:nooo~ :to ~elg~bor~oods which were all­Negro families wound up in ·mostly· h' eo. er an, only a fraction of the majority. being relocated in neighborho~slt~a n:gh~rhoods, the overwhelming Connecllcut Advisory Committee to the USe: g, . percent . o~ more Negroes. on COl/lleeticut: Family Relocatioll U/l(l • U 'b mm;slOn 01, Cl'O."! Ri.ghts, Rt'port

21 • je er I all enellial 39 (}uly 1963). See Breslm, Harlem's Endless Battle-The Rats C E .

Wash. (D.C.) Post July 25 1967 t A4 I ome very NIght ... ," may suffer as many' as 14 000 t' b

a. . t was reported recently that Americans

. d ' ra Ites a year and lose a bi1/i d lla m amage to food and goods Th .fi on 0 rs annually perts. N.Y. Times July 19 1967 t;se 1 g6u(r~s ar7 considered conservative by ex-

22 Cl l ' ) ) a , co . ~ate City ed ) eve and H caring at 25. . .

23 !d. at 66. 24 !d. 25!d. at 137. 2°ld. at 657. 27/d. at 658. 28/d. at 149. 29/d. at 695. 8°ld. at 148. 81 /d at 232 "'Th h

of ma~kind's 'seriousro~;ea~~: ~: ;o:~:d r;s are the agents by w~ich several the dread black death of th . p . oremost among these IS plague­United States to a' e Middle Ages. Plague still exists, even in the . mmor extent. Other diseases th t b Include typhus fever, trichinosis and seve. 1 1 a may .e spr~ad by rats by bacteria. In the United States h t~ ess. common InfectIOns caused is the rat bite itself' said D All ow.;er, t e mam hazard to human health Bureau of Disease Prevent' r. d u: .' Donaldson, associate director of the 29~,:967, at 9, col. 6 (late cit;~~.).n nVIronmental Control." N.Y. Times, July

- Slum areas typically have not onl th ld open spaces and e . lye 0 est schools, but the fewest parks , r creatlona opp t ., G b ' or Wlltles. ar age collection service and street

99

,<~

[' I

paving an~ lig~ts ~re o:t~n ~!~::;::~~~~ ~: ~~b~t~::t~;::sdt~e~:~~~;;~ are sometlmes l~a equa e. . .' '_ Bere most private as well as public qual.ity and .van~ty and h;~:~tl~f P~~~sing and Urban Developme~t, Evalua­serVIces are mfenor'pDepa d Goals Ribicoff Subcommittee Hearmgs, App, tion of Department rograms an , to pt, 1 at 20.

&8 Voice of the Ghetto at 41. , h US d ' B f ' the New Jersey State Advisory CommIttee to t e ..

84 Procee tngs e ole 30 1966 ~t 134 C .. 0 Cz'vl'l Rights in Newal'k, New Jersey, JlL'le, u ommlSSlOn n , [hereinafter cited as Newark TransCl'lpt]. •

85 Voice of the Glletto at 41-42. 1 'd ' 71: 76 Similarly Sternii,~b quotes a Newar { reSI ent 86 Bay Area Heartng at .r . ,

who had lived in a neighborhood in that city for over 25 years: ,

"You know the neighborhood has reall~ ~hang~~crri~li~:ii:c~::~o:::kl~~:~£ At first it was mostly German and Jewls ,an e Pd • r ything like h' N trucks parked overnight in the streets an no nOise 0 an

t mgs. 0, d the don't seem to come any more. • • • that. Now there IS h:!y w~~f~oli;: to st;y, but the neighborhood is run dow~ Ma~ of th~ o;:~ sell just to get away. Since Negroes have become ~redo:::l­so at mos. a h II d things that they would not allow when I Just st nnnt, the city as a owe

. moved here." Sternlieb, mpra note 8 at 231. .

87 See Committee for Economic Development, ,?eveloping MetropolItan Trans ortation Policies: A Guide for Local Leadcrs!H~ (1965). ,

88 ScCone Commission Report at 65. The COmffi1SS10n stated.

Our investigation has brought into clear. f~cus the fact !a~~h~~~a:i~~:: ::~ costly public ?=ansthPortati?d

n ~urr~n~e ~~:t~:~n:~~~g~~eus such as south central seriously restricts e resl en so. th . eking and

Los ~ng~les: This i~ck o~d;qua~e tr~~sP~~~t~~~~i~~P~the~~e~~:.e It has, had holdmg Jobs, atten~mg s ,00 S, S opp ~' . lation with its resultant frustratIOns, a major influence 10 creatlDg a sense 0 ISO , among the residents of south central Los Angeles ...•

The Commission found that only 14 percent of the families in Watts had cars.

ld. at 67. . f th M C e Commission A project has been undertaken since the lssua~cc 0 I~ conI' 1 th 1 w-

. . . A' I 13-mtle bus me now m{s e 0 P~i·OI·t to improve thIS SItuatIOn. SlUg e <4A d' . ~ f W· , wl'th industrial centers in the northeast a;;ea. ccor mg mcome atts "rea h' d

[b HUD] the number of riders on the route as Increase ~~ea~~/~;:: an ~nitial w~ekday average of 88,3 ~o the present level of 2,642 passengers." N.Y. Times, July 7,1967) at 37, col. 2 (CIty ed.).

89 Bay Area Hearing at 39-40. . . . 40 ld. at 40. According to the McCone Commtmon Report at 73-74.

100

(T}h number of doctors in the southeastern part of Los Angeles is grossly in­de :ate as compared with other parts of the city. It is repottc.d ~at ther~ are ~06q h sicians for some 252,000 people, whereas the county ratio IS three times

high~/ The hospitals readily accessible to ~e citizens in southeast~to~ ~ge;:: are also grossly inadequate in quality and 10 numbers of beds. a e g r!ni-

. hos itals which have a total capacity of 454 beds, only two meet ::ar;tand;rds ~f pro£essiona.1 quality. The two large public hOSPTithalsC'C'.o~ty

I b th d· t d difficult to reach. e ommlS-General and Harbor Genera, are 0 IS tan an . f th il bl sian recognizes that the motivation of patients to tak~ ~dvanta~e a ~sa:t:.~: medical facilities is an important factor in health condltlons but It app

facilities in the area are not even sufficient to care for those who now seek medical attention.

See also Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. DepartmeJ;lt of Labor, The Negroes in the United States: Theil' Economic and Social Situation 221-24 (1966), for a statistical breakdown of health problems and lack of service& among slum ghetto residents.

41 Bay Area Hearing at 52. The New York City Commission on Human Rights has investigated the lack of taxi service in Negro areas of New York City. William Booth, the Commission Chairman, testified before a New York State Advisory Committee meeting in New York City:

We have found that it's a common practice for medalion cab drivers to avoid Negro neighborhoods, and even to discriminate and not pick up Negroes on the street ••••

• • • We found the way they avoid Negro neighborhoods is using the off-duty sign. We have followed them with our batmobile from where they come over the bridge from the Bronx ioto Manhattan, up at 151st Street or thereabout or 141st Street, and they switcil on their off-duty sign. They travel in the center of the road away from the curb and travel fast through Harlem until they get down into lower Manhattan, 70th Street or thereabout, and then they turn the off-duty sign off and start picking up passengers again. Proceedings before the N.Y. State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rjghts in NetIJ York, N.Y., May 23, 1966 at 102-03 [hereinafter cited as New York Transcript].

42 Cleveland Hearing at 64. "The urban poor live in surroundings where poverty, ignorance, dilapidated housing, and crowded quarters contribute to disease and ill health. Even free medical assistance may not be feasible because carfare is lacking or., because of the loss of half day's pay while waiting one's turn at a crowded, often distant, dini,c." Report submitted by the Depar!ment of Housing and Urban Development to RibicofJ Subcommittee Hearings, App. to pt. 1 at 20. .

In July, 1967, the New York Times reported that a private, unfranchised bus company had begun operating two 1954 Ford school buses in the ghetto of South Jamaica, Queens, an area without convenient public transportation. According to the article, the operator of the company told a reporter that:

••• most of the 50,000 Negroes in the area had to walk five to ten blocks to the nearest line, and then had to change buses and pay two or three fares to get to hospitals in the area. N.Y. Times, July 26, 1967, at 22.

43 Cleveland Hearing at 231.

44 Cleveland Hearing at 731; 734. "In 1962 the chances were 87 in 100 that he [the Negro child] was born in a hospital. Whites, for whom the chances today are 99 in 100, reached today's Negro rate in 1946-a gap of sixteen years. In 1952 the gap was only eleven years. In 1962 the Negro was where the white had been in 1946; in 1952 the Negro was where the white had been in 1941. Thus it took the Negro ten years (from 1952 to 1962) to do what the white had done in five (from 1941 to 1946)-that is, to increase the percentage of hosptial births from 66 to 87. As a consequence the gap was widened." Fein, supra note 2 at 821.

45 Cleveland Hearing at 730. 46 Id.at45.

101

41 N r:wark Transcript at 239.

:: Cle~eland Hearin;t:: 5a~335. Professor Lee Rainwater of Washingt~? U~i-,Vty0(zcSe

t °Lof ~:) ~:tified before the Ribicoff Subcommittee about, condlhitl?nhs h1fi

versl. .' . S L • Mo a project wee the all-Negro Pruitt-Igoe HouslOg Project 10 t. OUIS, .,

had studied for three years: . • artment officers are as scar~e in the project vicinity as are

St. LouIs PolIce Dep. I' th t C'ty law enforcement officers often do private watchmen. Residents c alm a 1

not bother to answer their calls. • b h tcllmen and city policemen is viewed by

The lack of cooperation by ot ~a ns for the breakdown of law and Pruitt-Igoe residents as one or the primary rbeasko gambiing is not halted;

. th D' tu b nees are not ro en up; order m e area. IS r a. . s and robberies are unchecked. loitering and drinking are urunterrulPted! mugt£~gareas of the buildings without Numbers of unidentified persons seep m pu being disturbed. • • •

U• n of 'porlce brutality' or mistreatment at the hands of

The common accusa 0 , 1 . R ther •• '. from the Pruitt-Igoe tenants camp amts. a. ' law officers 15 strangel~ abs~th f' dividual citizens is a common accusatIOn; police indifference to e p Ig t 0 In ffi . ore the calls and complaints of guards and public law enfohrceme~ 0

:rs ~f~al report. Ribicofj Subcommittee tenants or respond to them ours er e Hearings, pt. 9 at 2041,

50 Voice of the Ghetto at 36. 51 Cleveland Hearing at 523. t and Admin

'd ' C ., on Law Enforcemen -52 /d at 526. The PreSl ent s ommlSSlon . .

. . th U[]h ears to be a correlatlon between cnme istration of Justlce found at t ere app d 11" Challenge

1 t· n and the time it takes for patrol officers to respon to a ca . " so U 10 f' R t that there was a at 97 The Commission stated in the Summary 0 Its epor h' . 0 the el t: n hip between the speed of response and certainty of appre enSlon. n h :v:r:~e s response to emergency calls resulting in arrest was 5~ percent faster t an

respons~ to emergency calls not resulting in arrests:' Id. at VI.

S8 CleveZand-Hearing at 527. . ' d S . MId at 36. A research study, C,.iminal Victimization zQ! t~e Untte . . tat Res.

. . d' 1967 b the Natlonal OplUlOn e-A Report of a National Survey-submltte In Y d th Ad

ch Center to the President's Commission on Law Enforcement an. ~ -se~r . . f J t' -found that "the fear of being outside alone at rught IS ••• nurustratlon 0 us Ice . ., d th ''N roes to a greater extent than much greaterfor Negroes than whItes an at eg . d d £ " Id at whites, have stayed home rather than go some:w~e~ ~O~Sl ::it~:s~:t in' his 73-74. Professor Rainwater reported to the RihlcO u co

study d . . that she "would like to attend church Id loman tol an mtervlewer h •

••• an e er y wb I" '. the center stairwell frighten her, and s e IS much more but oys Oltermg m . " . afraid to come home from church at ntght. ,c, .:.

. d th elderly are vl."':Ual prisoners m th~\lt Many residen~s~ ~;e~;~\:o::e.~hey :re afraid to leave; yet, if ~ey remnilIl :~::'~y 0 ar~ often d1sturbed by noisy groups of adolescents or children ••••

RibicotJ Subcommittee Hearings, pt. 9 at 2041.

65 Vojce of the Ghetto at 34. th N' 1 5~ A survey of public attitudes toward the police conducted by. • e atl~a

1 '

'j

Opinion Research Center at the request of the President's CommISSIon on w

102

/:: 1/ 1/

/1 Y

/ if / \1\

--------------------------~

Enforcement and Administration of Justice revealed that 23 percent of all white people thought that the police were doing an "excellent" job of enforcing the law, while only 15 percent of nonwhites held that view. Sixty-three percent of the whites but only 30 percent of the nonwhites thought the police were "almost all honest." Only one percent of the whites hut 10 percent of the nonwhites thought the police were "almost all corrupt." Challenge at 99.

51 Voice of the Ghetto at 34. 58 Cleveland Hearing at 524. See Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 21, 1965. 59 In The Police and tIle Community: The Dj1namics of Their Relationship in

tt Changing Society, a Report prepared for the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice by the School of Criminology of the University of California at Berkeley, a middle class Negro interviewed distin­guished carefully between overt behavior on the part of police officers and their attitudes which have "negative implications":

It's not the allegation pcr se, not the behavior or the act that the minority is par­ticularly objecting to. It's the attitude toward them, in all of these cases. They will say, time and time again, "1£ he'd [the policeman] just listen and try to understand it. 1 could understand his position, but he won't even listen to me." And some of them put in nasty words, the officers. Nasty words, profanity, it's no different, The pattern is that it's a lack of respect and dignity and acceptance of another person. 'l'his is the whole thing in a nutshell. Vol. 1 at 87.

60 Cleveland Hearing at 540. 61Id. A Negro resident of Harlem, about 33 years of age, stated:

The white cops, they have a damn sadistic nature. They are really a sadistic type of people and we,l mean me, myself, we don't need them here in Harlem. We don't need them! They don't do the neighborhood any good. They deteriorate the neighborhood. They start more violence than any other people start. They start violence, that's right. A bunch of us could be playing some music, or danc­ing, which we have as an ourlet for ourselves. We can't dance in the house, we don't have clubs or things like that. So we're out on the sidewalk, right on the sidewalk; we might feel like dancing, or one might want to play something on his horn. Right away here comes a cop. 'You're disturbing the' peacel' No one has said anything, you understand; no one has made a complaint. Everyone'is enjoying themselves. But here come one cop, and he'll want to chase everyone. And gets mad. I mean, he gets madl We .aren't mad. He comes into the neigh­borhood, aggravated and m'ad. Clark, Dark Ghetto 4-5 (1965).

62 Cleveland Hearing at 535-36. 6S /d. at 536. 64Id. at 579-80. 65Id. at 514. A study conducted by the School of Criminology of the University

of California at Berkeley, supra note 59 Vol. 1 at 89, reported that:

The minority community is virtually unanimous in its criticism of existing com­plaint procedures in the Police Department. Repeatedly the view is expressed that the police do not conscientiously and objectivelY listen to complaints. The domi­nant belief is that once a complaint is submitted "olle never hears about it again." Th~re is an attitude of "why complain?" when nothing will result.

66 Cleveland Hearing at 589. 61 ld. at 606. . 68 Id. at 589. 69 ld.

103

Footnotes to Chapter 3. 1 Gary Transcript at 34-35. N 2 According to the Buteau of Labor Statistics: "In 1964, 37 percent of e~;o

families had incomes below $3,000, compared with only 15 percent of W Ite families." Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States De~art~ent ?f Labor, The Negroes in the United States: Their Economic and Social Sttuatlon 35 (1966).

8 Cleveland Hearing at 648. -1 Voice of the Ghetto at 3. . • . d 5 U S Dept of Labor A Sharper Look. at Unemployment tn U.S. Clttes an

Slum;, March: 1967. Se~ also "Poverty Areas of Our Major Cities," 89 Monthly Labor Review 1105 (1966) : .

In the big cities of America, more than half the Negroes but only .one-tenth. of the whites live in poverty areas. By almost every measure of economIc ~~e1~be~g available through the survey, Negroes in poverty arcas were less we 0 t a~ whites in the same type of area: Negroes had higher unempl~yment rates an less desirable jobs; they worked shorter hours; and Negro ~en In t}le :e,ntral age roups had lower labor force participation rates and hIgher dIsabIlIty rates.

~oreover Negroes living in non-poverty areas were not much better off than those in ;overty areas; among whites, the differences were very sharp.

e A Sharper Look at Unemployment in U.S. Cities and Slums, sttpm note 5. Accordin to that report, the unemployment rate for urban slum areas was 10 perce!, three times the average (3.7 percent) for the rest of the .~ountrYf Even more significant in the 8 cities surveyed, one out of three reSl ents a the slums had a seriou; employment problem. This suu-.employment ra~~ed from 242 percent in Boston to 47.4 percent in San Antomo. The other cmes were N~w Orleans (45.3 percent); New York-Harlem (28.6 percent); New York-E H 1 (331 percent)· New York-Bedford Stuyvesant (27.6 percent); . ar em.) . (~8 9 t) Philadelphia (34.2 percent); Phoenix (41.7 percent); St. LOUIS ,j. percen , and San Francisco (24.6 percent).

7 U.S. Dept, of Labor, Sub-Employment in the Slums of Oakland, March, 1967. BId. 9 Bay Area Hr:aring at 218. . . . th 10 In the slum areaS of all U.S. cities with more than 250,000 population e

unemployment rate among nonwhite 14-19 year olds was 3~ percent ~~r boys and 46 percent for girls. A Sharper Look at Unemployment tn U.S. Clttet and Slums, supra note 5 at 1.

11 Sub-Employment in the Slums of Oakland, supra note 7. . 12 U.S. Dept. of Labor, Sub-Employme1lt in the Slums of San FrancISCo, March

1967. 13 Bay Area Hearing at 458.

14Id. . . al 1G Cleveland Hearing at 632. Increasingly, low paying jobs restrIct oCCUpatIon

mobility:

104

The poor have jobs which don't lead o.n}'where: domestics, service, , unskilled laboft".rs farm workers, etc. H~rd work in these jobs docs not pay off, sl~ce wage

'j' 'e low and there are few ",promotions" within the same estabhshment. eCI lOgs af '.. h'ch Neither however does hard work produce transferable skills or expcnence w I enable dte wotke~ to change jobs and get on the promotion ladder of some other

firm. A. Haber, "The American UJlderclass" in Poverty and Hliman Resources Ilbstracts, Vol. II, No.3 at 7 (May-June 1967).

In addition, low paying jobs are becoming more insecure. From 1953 to 1963, 1.6 million blue-collar jobs were eliminated by automation-. Many Were those in which there was a heavy concentration of Negroes. T. Kahn, "The Economics of Equality" in Poverty i1l America 160-161 (Ferman, Kornbluh and Haber, ed., 1965).

10 Bay Area Hearing at 279. Daniel Moynihan has said:

In America what you do is what you are: to do nothing is to be nothing; to do little is to be little. "Employment, Income, and the Ordeal of the Negro Family", 94 Daedalus 746 (Fall 1965).

Dr. Kenneth Clark quoted a resident of Harlem:

No one with a mop can expect respect from a banker, or an attorney, or men who create jobs, and all you. have is a mop. Are you crazy? Whoever heard of integration between a mop and a banker? Dark Ghetto 2 (1965).

11 Bay Area Hearing at 277, 78. In Dark Ghetto, Dr. Clark quotes a young Negro man from Harlem:

You know the average young person out here don't have a job, man, they don't have anything to do. They don't have any alternative, you know, but to go out there and try to make a living for themselves. Like when you come down to the Tombs down there, they're down there for robbing and breaking in. They want to know why you did it and where you live, but you have to live. You go down to the employment agency and you can't get a job, They have you waiting all day, but you can't get a job, They don't have

j a job £0t1 you. Yet you have to

live. I'm ready to do anything anyone else is ready to do--because I want to live-­I want to live. No one wants to die, I want to live. Dark Ghetto 1 (1965).

18 Federally-aided welfare payments are made only to a limited category of impoverished persons: the aged, the blind, the disabled, and dependent children in needy families in which the breadwinner either is absent or incapacitated. Local municipalities and counties also have general welfare or relief programs supported entirely by local revenues. Report of the Advisory Council on Public Welfare to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, HavilJg the Power} We Have the Duty 24-25 (June, 1966).

10 This figure is based on computations by the Commission staff using figures . for the number of nonwhites receiving AFDC payments in the Hough area and figures fo(' the total nonwhite population in that area in 1964-65. In 1961, in Central Harlem, the aid-to-dependertt children rate was 226.5 per 1,000 youth under 18 years of age-a rate three times as high as for the city as a whole (72.0). Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc., Youth in the Ghetto: A Study of the Consequences of Powerlessness 148 (1964).

Nationwide, "AFDC families increased from 815,000 in January 1961 to 1,069,000 in December 1965. Child recipients in tht:se families increased from 2,406,000 to 3135.8,000 and adult recipients from 712,000 to 1,099,000." "Trend in Number of AFDC Recipients, 1961-65," Welfare in Review} May, 1967 at 7. This article also contains a discussion of the reasons for this increase. For a discussion of State implementation of child welfare services, see "Extending Child Welfare Services/' Welfare in Review, April 1967 at 16,

20 Report of the Advisory Council on Public Welfare, supra note 18 at 18. 21U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; Children in Need, A Study of a Fed.

erally Assisted Program of Aid to Needy Families euith Children in CletJelanti

271-9i70-6'7 __ 8 105

~: "

and Cuyahoga County, Ohio 37 (1966) [hereinafter cited as Children in Need]. In Cuyahoga County, "[T]he actual ADC payment for a family of four in January 1966, was 81 cents less than it was six years earlier despite the fact that the State standard increased by $23.05 during the same period. The Cuyahoga County Welfare Department estimated that between 1960 and 1966 the cost of living for welfare families in the county increased approximately 11 percent." Id. at 9.

22 See Cleveland Hearing at 59-60 and 104-106. The Te,messee Housing Report at 30 found "that the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare's rates of payments to needy persons for housing have not been revised since 1956, and that no differential in payments is permitted for the higqer rents in urban areas. Present rent allowances do not enable welfare recipients to obtain decent housing. Thus, welfare payments are used for rent in substandard housing." See also, E. Wood, "Social-Welfare Planning," 352 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 119,123 (March 1964) ("Rental allowances of most public assistance agencies fall below the cost of standard dwellings. Most public assistance agencies have no minimum standards for the housing of their clients. . .• Under current realities of housing conditions and cost, a high per­centage of welfare clients live in houses of less than standard condition. Whenever a newspaper runs a scare series on scandalous housing conditions, one may be sure that most of the tenants are welfare clients").

2a Cleveland Hearing at 106. M Cleveland Hearing at 239-54. The Advisory Council on Public Welfare

concluded that:

Public Assistance Payments to nwly families and individuals fall srriously b~low what this Nation has proclaimed to be the "poverty level."

.. I> ..

The national average provides little more than half the amount admittedly re­quired by a family for subsistence; in some low-income States, it is less than a quarter of that amount. The low public assistance payments contribute to the perpetuation of poverty and deprivation that extends into future generations. Report of ~e Advisory Council on Public Welfare, supl'a note 18, at 15-16.

The Council recommended ua minimum standard for public assistance pay-ments below which no State may fall." ld. at 15. .

According to Wilbur J. Cohen, Under Secretary of HEW, "the average pay­ment per child for the Nation on the whole is $35 per month per child, and $145 per month per family for the mother and her children. So, it is running not much more I would say than $1 per day per person." RibicofJ Subcommittee Hearings pt. 2, at 330. In ChIldren in N eedl the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted (p. 12):

106

An impression can :also be gained of the inadequacy of the:: ADC payment by comparing the gap which separates the dollar amount for food and other non­shdter items coveted by the cash payment to an ADO family of four and the amount needed to reach an adequate but modest American standard of living in respect to these items. In the autumn of 1959 the U.S. Department of Labor estimated that the annual cost for food at home, for clothing, and for personal care in the city of Cleveland totaled $2,068. The average cash payment for an ADC family of four in 1960 for food, clothing, personal care, and household supplies was $69.64 per month or, on a 12-rnonth basis, $835.80. Consequently, an ADC family of four in Cleveland received only about 41 percent of wbat the Department of Labor estimated was needed by a family of four to maintain an adequate but modest level of living in that city.

, ' " I , ,

, , ! ,

r:

f1 tt

t! i ~

I ! I

r f: f' l' ; \

',;

See also M. Orshansky, l'Who's Who Among the Poor' A De h' View f P " 28 S . I . . mograp lC

• 0 overty, ocza Securtty Bulletin 3 (July 1965), and "Countin the i;~;).Another Look at the Poverty Profile," 28 Social Security Bulletin 3 (Ja:uary

25 Gary Tmnscript at 27-28.

.26ld. at 44-4? A former welfare recipient who recently had obtained a 'ob

Wl~ ~ local antI-pov.erty program was questioned by Senator Robert Kenned J at a RIbIcoff Sub:o~mmee meeting about the attitude toward welfare of her f . y d who were reCIpIents: nen s

~hey do ~o~ wantthto be on welfare. I have friends that are on welfare because t ey ar7 SIC and ey cannot work, and they do not want to be on wel£are I have frtends that have children ranging in numbers of five e . • m 13 h £ " s ven, nme, 13, as

any as ,w 0 a~e on wel are, wh? do not have a high school education who do not llave baby sItters to keep thClI children while they go tak . b tr ~ •

There are a lot of reasons why they are on welfare. They do not ~v~:t toa~~~ welfare. And the people that 1 have been affiliated with on welfare none of th m ;~~~ t:t ~~~9~ welfare. Tbey have nothing else. Ribitoff SlIbCOtll1l:ittee Heari:gs

21 Gary Transcript at 45-47. .28 Cleveland Hearing at 243. In a recent report, the U.S. Commission C"l

Rights noted: on IVI

A~t~ough the 1959 Ohio budget standard is referred to frequently as a mtnun'.1~ a?e~ua~e standard of health and decency, it does, in fact, have certam limitatIons. The food component is based on a low-cost foo~ plan developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1959 While the plan is nu~itio~ally ~dequate, it is based on the assumptio~ that the homemaker IS skillful III buying food ateconomI'''al . . h . £ d th .. prIces, tn c OOSIng ~o s at. would result in achieving nutritionally adequate meals, and In prepanng the food in an attractive manner so that it would be eaten. -

. The ~others who manage ADC families may not be able to purchase in qu~ntIty and may depend on neighborhood grocery stores which cus­tomarily sell at relatively high prices. The U.S. Department of Labor in Februa~y 1966, conducted a study of the prices charged by food stores !oc~ted Illlo~.Income areas and by those located in higher income areas

_ III SI~ large CItIes. Although Cleveland was not included among the dties studIed, the following findings of the Labor Department are rele-vant .•.. - , .

1. Prices are usua!ly higher .... in the _small independent stores which are most common. 10 low inc~me neighborhoods than in large -inde­pendents and cham stores whxch predominate in the higher income areas.

. 2 .. ,'. Patrons ~n low i~come area stores [tend] to purchase certain ltems III smaller sizes at higher unit costs than those in higher income area stores.

3. Stores located in low inco~e ~:eas te~d to be somewhat less orderly and clean than those located tn hIgher mcomeareas, and meats and produce do not appear as fresh. CIJt1drcn In Need <'It" 15-16

29 Cleveland Hea1'1'ngat 240-44. •

107

so ld. at240. lI1.ld. at 243> 244. s2Id.at242. / as Id. at 243; Children In Need at 14, 16. .. B-1 Clevela"d Hearit:g at 245. Sli ld. at 246. SGld. at 250. 371d. at 240. sSId. at 242. , S9 Gary Tnmscript at 37~38. . . ' 40 S g Manual of the Arkansas Department of Public Welfare, § § 2800 and

ee, e •• J I .. d A 'e Manual 2813 (July 1966). New Jersey Department of nsUtutlOn9 an gencl~' ' of Administration, Bureau of Assistance, Part II §§ 2280-8! (Jan. L 60). ~he Advisory Council on Public Welfu.re recommended the estabhshment of a ll~tlO~­wide comprehensive program o( public assistance. based on ~eed alon~ lU Its

Report to the Secret:1ry in 1966. Report of the AdvIsory Counal on Pubhc Wel-fare supra note 18, at 23.

U Cleveland Her;ring at 251. . . olll Gary Transcr;pt at 138. See also California Welfare Study Comr~llsslOn,

Final Report (1963). The Commission, created by the ~overnor and ~g.lslatur: of California in 1961 to study "the whole field of pubhc welfare laws lU Cali-

fornia, said in its final report: [1] t' clear that the lack in many areas of our state, of suitable provision for

• ~s an e of decent li;ing standards in the families of the unemployed has :':;:nd

c direct tendencies to !lromote family disintegration ~d ~oral d.egrada­

tion. It is now the fact in California that a father who ~(es h~s chl1dr~n In wa~t because he cannot fmd work knows that, jf he des;rts hiS famIly, subSistence Will

be forthcoming unljer the ANe [Aid to Needy Children J program that he cannot

provide by his owl'. efforts (pp.55-56).

The Governor's CortlIDission on the Los Angeles Riots found that:

Thewdf:ue prc,gtam that provides for his [Negro male] children is,ad.minist~ed so that it injur<:s his position as the head of his household~ because aid 1~ supplIed

"th less restr;lIDt to a family headed by a woman, mamed or untllarned. Thus, ~~ unemployt'Cl male often finds it to his family's adv~tagc ,to, drift ~way an? 1 th family to fend for itself. Once he goes, the !family unit )5 broken and IS ~;:m ~estored. Changes in welfare administration designed to hold together rather than break apart the fa,mily have not been wholly successful. McCone Commission Report at 38.

43 Cleveland Hear-ing at 251. H Newarl( Transcript at 328. 45 !d. at 329. 4ll Cleveland Hearing at 81-82. .. 7 Gary Transcript at 43. 4&42 U.S.C. § 601 (1964). 4~ Clef/eland Hearing at 249. ~~ ld. at239-48. lS~ Voice of the Ghetto at 31. ~2 Gmy Transcript adO. i3ld. at 30-31. IS" CletJelandHermngat242. S5Idat250.

108

t 1 I

\ 1

56 Voice of the Ghetto at 30. 67 Gary Transcript at 40. G&!d. at 52. 69 Cleveland Hearing at 245. 60 ld. at248. 61 "In. March 1966, 56 percent of all employed Negro women held service

jobs; half of them were employed in private households. With moderate varia­tions, these percentages held for the Nation, for the big cities as a whole, and for poverty areas in the cities. In contrast, the chief occupations all10ng white women ill metropolitan areas were in the clerical or semiskilled operative categories­with both higher pay and higher status." J. Wetzel and S. Holland, "Poverty Areas of Our Major Cities," 89 Monthly Labor Review 1107-08 (Oct. 1966).

62 Cleveland Hearing at 398. 6~ ld. at 399. 04 ld. at 400. 65 ld. at 398. oOld. at 400-401. 01 !d. at 401. G8ld. at 108. An analysis of the 1960 Census shows that in Baltimore, Chicago,

and Cleveland. nonwhite renters pay more but receive poorer housing than do whites. In aU 17 cities examined, including Baltimore, Chicago and Cleveland, a greater percentage of nonwhite fall1i1ies with low to moderate incomes ($4,000-$6,999) were found to live in unsound housing than was true of whites of com­parable incomes. G. Nesbitt and E. Hoeber, 61 Land Economics 102 (May 1965).

69 NewQ1'k T1'ansctipt at 322-23. The Cleveland CitiZens Committee on Hough Disturbances found that in the Hough area "local merchants charge higher prices for inferior quality merchandise. Landlords charge exorbitant rates for dilapidated, unsanitary dwellings. Because of transportation limitations, neigh~ borhood residents are unable to do the kind of comparison shopping that most people take for granted. Slum. residents are deeply aware of these inequities and feel a sense of bitterness and resentment toward the business, civic and political leadership that allows such conditions to flourish. The pattern of destruction on Hough Avenue st'ems to be a tangible expression of these feelings of exploita­tion." Rt'bicofJ Subcommittee Hearings, pt. 4, at 1042.

10 Gary Transtnpt at 36. 711d. at 55. 12 Cleveland Hearing at 253. 1ald. 14 Bay A.rea Hearing at 76. 7IS The riots have aggravated the situation. After the recent riots in Newark and

Detroit the Wall Street Journal reported:

It is widely reported that property-casualty insurance rates in the f2entral Ward [Newark] are already four times as high as those prevail­ing in the 'safe; suburbs; any further sizable boosts would certainly make doing business .in the Central Ward prohibitively e.xpensive for some' tradesmen. .

This is precisely what has happened in Watts, according to Wesley Doyle, a chairn:lan of the Chamber of ComtIlerce th~e. Besides continu­ing feat of more trouble, extreme difficulty in getting adequate insurance

109

"

at reasonable rates has made businessmen reluctant to open-or reopen­

shops t.'-1ere, he claims. Rates in Watts are now running about 2Yz times what they were

before the rioting there, . . . . .•. Mr. Doyle says that rates in Watts were always hIgher than

in other areas of the city and that insurance in Watts now costs nve times as much as in 'safe' locations. .

Moreover he claims that some policies available at sky-hIgh rates can be canceled 'at a moment's notice. "This means," says. M~. D~yle, "that if a disturbance starts Sunday night and looks as If It mIght grow into something big, a man's insurance might be cut off on ~onday. And if he goes up in flames Monday night, he's out of luck. Wall Street

Journal, July 28,1967, at 18. . Getting insurance on new buildings will also be a bIg hurdle [to

rebuilding Detroit], no matter how much n~ancing is aV;ilable. ~'N~~ too many businesses around here have nre msurance. It s too hIg~, because of the high-crime rate, says Ed Brazelton, operator of a flor~st shop on 12th Street near where the trouble began. Insurance compames are expected to be even more reluctant now. Without insu:ance, .the SBA [Small Business Administration] and local lenders \~on t get ~n:o these areas, bankers here say. Neither will the Federal Housmg AdmInIS­tration, which requires nre insurance on home leans. Id. at 5.

76 Cleveland Hearing at 122. 77ld. at 34. 7sld. at 33. 79 Id. at 43-44. so ld. at 34. Slld. at 35. S2 Bay Area Hearing at 215-16.

Footnotes to Chapter 4. 1 Cleveland Hearing at 632. . , 2 The 1967 Annual Report of the President's Council of EconomIC AdVIsers

stated: Many individuals with serious unemployment problems ,suffer per~onal ,dis­

advantages which make it difficult for them to get or hold Jobs ev~n I,n a tight labor market, Special studies of the unemployed i~ ,ghetto areaS t~dlr.ate ~at many of the long-term unemployed are functionally Ilhterate. Econ,omlc Repolt oj the President (together with the All/mal Repol't of tile COIl/ICII 0/ ECOIl0tl/lI:

Advisers) 107 (1967).

8 Cleveland Hearing at 316; The HARYOU study found that in 1959, ~3 percent of the students in academic high schools and 61, per~e~t of ~ose 1n

vocational schools in Central Harlem dropped out wituout recelVlng a d~ploma. "A lower drop-out rate is revealed by a study of school drop-outs [durl?~ ~e 1960-61 academic year] in Manhattan conducted by the New York Sta;e DlVls~on of Youth. This study shows that "approximately 41 percent of the pupIls entermg high school from Central Harlem drop out before receiving a dip~o~a." Many students never reach high school: "The New York State study also llldlcated that

110

d'

during [1960-61] about 3.8 percent of the pupils in junior high school dropped out." Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc., Youth in the Ghetto: A Study of the Consequences of Powerlessness and a Blueprint for Change 181-82 (1964) [hereinafter cited as Youtll in the Ghetto]. Johnie Scott, a 20-yeat<;ld Negro member of Budd Schulberg's writing workshop in Watts, described the attrition of his public school class in Watts:

There were 550 kids in my graduating class at Edwin Markham Junior High School. Three days later we registered at Jordan Senior High. There were 250 of us; 300 were already gone. Three years later we were seniors at Jordan. With but twenty weeks remaining before high school graduation there were 107 of us ..•• According to the counselors, who confided to our advanced composition class only a few days before graduation, the average grade point of the Jordan graduate in my class was 1.8 (D-minus), and his reading level was 6.0 (sixth grade). "My Home is Watts," Harper's, vol. 233, October 1966, at 47.

There were 1,426,538 persons of Spanish surname in the State of California in 1960. More than half of the Spanish surname men and almost half of the women 14 years old and over had not gone beyond the eighth grade in school, and no schooling at all was reported for 83 percent of the Spanish surname men and 6.3 percent of the women. Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Fair Employment Practices, Californians of Spanish Sttrname 5, 6 (May 1964).

4 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools 74 (1967) [hereinafter cited as Racial Isolation in the Public Schools]. In 1965, the U.S. Army administered to all inductees tests which reflected both the individual's level of educational attainment and the quality of his education. While 14.7 percent of all whites failed, 59.6 percent of all Negroes failed. Office of the Surgeon General, Department of Army, 21 Supplement to Health of the Army 2>3 (1966).

G New York Transcript at 272. Other observers have come to the same conclu­sion. See The N.:gro Labor Market in Chicago: 1966-Conditions in Employ­ment and Manpower Training 10 (1967).

G Voice of the Ghetto at 21. '7 Id. at 24. In its recent study, Racial Isolation in the Public Schoots at 92,

the Commission found that Negro students generally are more likely to be in overcrowded schools than white students. See also a report prepared by the Office of Education, Coleman et al, Equality of Educational Opportunity 70, rable 2.21.4 (1966) [hereinafter cited as the Coleman Report]. According to Hobson v. Hansen, 269 F. Supp. 401, 433 (D.D.C. 1967), in the District of Colum­bia, 26 predominantly Negro schools (85-100 percent) operated at at least 120 percent of capacity in 1965-66. No school which was less than 15 percent Negro operated in excess of capacity and only one of the schools between 15 to 33 percent Negro operated over capacity.

8 Cleveland Hearing at 297. The Coleman Repoi't shows that Negro students are less likely than white students to attend schools which offer advanced courses in subjects such as science and language and which have science laboratories. Coleman Report at 73, Table 2.21.8. See also Racial Isolation in the Public Stiiools at 92-94.

In Hobson v. Hansen, supra, the courl: found that while all predominantly white elementary schools in Washington, D.C. had libraries, only 47 percent of the predominantly Negro elementary schools in slum areas did. 269 F. Supp. at 433.

111

I

. \

o Cleveland Hearing at 289. 10 ld. 11 ld. In the course of its study of crime in the United States, the President's

Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice found it necessary to examine the problems of education in the slums, since those problems were found to have a strong impact upon juvenile delinquency. After discussing some of those problems, the Commission continued:

These problems are further reinforced by the lack of relationship between the instructional material usually provided by slum schools and the social, economic, and political conditons of living in the slums. To the youngster, the instruction seems light years away from the circumstances and facts of life that surround him every day. The following comments of a former delinquent arc illuminating: "It wasn't interesting to me, I liked the science hooks but I didn't dig that other stuff. Dick and Jan~ went up the hill to fetch a pail of water and all that crap. Mary had a little lamb. Spot jumped over the fence. * " * I say, ain't this the cutest little story. And I took the book one day and shoved it straight back to the teacher and said I ain't going to read that stulI."

The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration ot Justice, Task Force Report: Juvenile Delillqtlency and Youth Crime 50 (1967).

12 Proceedings Before the California State Advisory Committee 111 Los Angeles, Calif. June 8, 1967 at 273, 277 [hereinafter cited as Los Allgeles Transcript].

13 Hearing Before the U.S. Commissioll on Civil Rigllt.f in Boston, Massa­c/ltIsetts Oct. 4-5, 1966 at 26, 27, 29 [hereinafter cited as Boston Hearing]. Negro students nationally are more likely than white students to have teachers who are dissatisfied with their school assignments as well as teachers with low verbal achievement. Raciallsalation in the Public Schools at 93-94. See Coleman Report at 156, Table 2.34.8. In Hobson 11. Hansen, supra 1I0te 7, at 434-36 the court found that the facll.llies in the predominantly white schools were much more experienced; a proportionally higher number of temporary teachers were on faculties of predOlninantly Negro schools.

See also Massachusetts State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Report on Racial Imbalance in the Boston Public Schools (January 1965), and National Education. Association, Commission on Professional Rights and Responsibilities, Baltimore, Maryland: Change and Contrast-The Children and the Public Schools (May 1967).

1-1 Hearing Before tile U.S. Commission on Cil/il Rights, Rocllester, NeIll Yark Sept. 16-17, 1966 at 17-18 [hereinafter cited as Rac/zester Hearing].

15 Voice of the G/letto at 23. 16 Rochester Hearing at 233-34. 17 ld. at 63. 18 Boston Hearing at 55. 10 Cleveland Hearing at 314. 20 Racial Isolation in tile Publt'c Schools at 84-87. According to the Colema11

Report the average Negro pupil has fewer classmates whose mothers graduated from high school; his classmates more frequently are members of large rather than small families; they are less often enrolled in college preparatory curricula; and they have more often the other characteristics of low income families, such as no father in the home. Coleman Report at 18-20, Tables 7 and 8. The Coleman Report at 22 concludes:

112

Finally, it appears that a pupil's achievement is strongly related to the educational backgrounds and aspirations of the other students in the school. Only crude

I 1 I

1

i

measures of these variables were used (pr' . all th encyclopedias in the home and the propo:O~P ~ proportion of pupils with sis indicates, however, that children from a gi:en mrr:t t\g~to college). Analy­in schools of different social composition will chi y a .grou,nd, when put

• ' a eve at qUite different levels

ThIS conclusion is discussed in detail at pages 302-12 of th C 1 • 21 Bostan Hearing at 66. e a eman Report.

2C2

Rl ochbe.~teur F!eart:ng at 208 •. John H. Fischer, President of Teachers College at 0 urn la lllverslty, has WrItten:

~A] school enrolling largcly Negro tud '1m ' lower status and less desirable than

s on;n~~d~d ~~ ~~l1versall~nsidered of students. Regardless of the quality of th b 'Id' th 0 y or m y by white or the size of classes, a school compose~ ::: :r!::_fo:~mpetence o~ the staff, one-fo.urth wh!te c?ildrcn is viewed by members of both r:c~~~t ~dr~th and exception, as Iflfenor to one in which the proporti' ,llad Y WI out all u h . I' ons are r,verse Whether

. s c appralsa s are valid remains, at least for the' b ' " pOint. So often are "Negro" schools inferior and so 10 h tun~ eIDg, beSide the assigned to hand-me-downs that unhappy ,ng avde egro ~tudents been 'b memones an generalized impr

slons m~st e expected to persist despite the occasional resence es-schools Ifl Negro neighborhoods "Race and R T ~ Th of really good School," 95 Daedalus 26 (Winter i966). econCI13tion: e Role of the

23 Cleveland Hearing at 307-08. 24 ld. at 282. 25 Rochester Hearing at 62. 26 Cleveland Hearing at 308. 27 !d.

28 !d. at 282. , 20!d. T~e President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Admini t _

non of J ustlce reported that: s ra

The deficiencies of the slum school f th ~at t~e intellectual capability of mo:~I~ ~I~~~a~a~~~ ~~tc:i~:s~~~: :~: e ucatlon. As a result standards are lowered to meet the level the child is as-sumed to occupy. Frequently the cl13nce to stimulate latent curiosit and 't ment about Ic;arning is irretrievably lost, and the self-fulfillin y ro h exci e-(f~~.and fmlure comes true. Tile Clla/lellge 0/ Crime ill II te: S~ci~~; ;6

30 Boston Hearing .at 62. 31 ld. at 63-64. 32 !d. at 64.

8S Voice at the Gll/tUo at 26. 841d. at 22. 85 Rochester Headng at 21. The HARYOU Report agreed that tho . .

problem: IS 15 a major

~~ch angry comment has resulted from the practice of guidance counselors ad

~~~r:~:b~:o li;~:~~ ~~!et:~:~: £~~J~~~;hf~I~O~~p~fsm;~~~~~tt:~ti:~i a e est mterests of the youth arc being protected So th .

it is I'IT bett t t th • e reaselllng goes find ~ I er 0 seer . e .youllgstr;r toward those occupations in which he ca~

p oyment, even If hiS potentials are far greater than to encourage him t pursue a career whicll is likely to end in bitter £rus~ation and in not find' 0

:;_rk at a~, The ~riority here placed upon adjustment produces Negro youngst:~ GI\~~;:~e26~~ ta e adVantage of jobs newly opened to Negroes. Youth in the

113

86 Racial Isolation in the Public Schools at 100-14. 81 !d. at 114.

8842 U.S.C. §§ 2571-2620 (1964). . . e the most im ort-89 The Manpower Development and Trammg programs ar . dP .

U '1 1966 MDT A programs were alme pn-ant Federal training programs. nU , 1 maril at technological unemployment rather than hard core unemp oym.ent.

caly

d 1966 230 000 persons [of all races] were enrolled; and smce "In en ar year , , ...] t'ti " .. 1962 the MDT A program has provided [trammg oppor uru cs Its mception III d b th . 1966

B h 230 000 persons affecte y e program 10 for 613 000 persons. ut t e , . b £ . 't donI a small fraction (about 6 percent) o~ the total num er 0

constltu e d y ( . ately 3 million) plus the estimated one-half to unemploye persons approXilll I d M h one million potential workers who were not ev:n counted ~s unemp ~ye. uc

. . b d "R port of the Jomt EconomIc CommIttee on tile more remams to e one. e 90 h C anuar 1967 Economic Report of the President, S. Rep. No. 73, . t .o~g.,

11 S Y 28 (1967) Other efforts by the Federal Government to provide trammg st ess.. h N' hborhood Youth and retrain in opportunities include the Job Corps, t e ~lg

Cor s Work ~xperience, Adult Work Program, and the Spe~lal I~p~ct Program. p, 11 d 3600.00 disadvantaged youth 10 tra10mg through These programs enro e ,

1966.!d.. . b . E onomie Progress The Joint Committee reported that Its Su committee on c had found that "[d]espiie a projected doubling by 1970 of the number .of pers?ns to be trained annually under theMDTA, these [training] programs Will ~~ovlde for considerably less than one pt;.rcent of the labor !orce." ld: at 29. :':c~or l~g:O the Subcommittee, only a major increase in publIc and .pr!vate ~a~nmg ~'h~r ~ to reach the hard-core unemployed will meet t~e nation s nee or a 19. employment economy." Id.

40 Clct/eland Hearing at 404-08. . .' 41 !d. at 405-06. The McCone Commission Report found ~at 10 trammg pro·

grams generally, incluJing those under MDT A: , , there is an apparent lack of coordination between many of ththe trammg

l pro­

.. • .. II f th in the Sou Centra area grams and the job opportunltJes. A too a ten akiYllout fill a) 'ob only to find that

h " u' res the necessary s 0 goes throug trammg, acq I .. ("T ' for what?" he says to his no job awaits him, The results are Olsastrous. ram friends.) McCone Commission Report at 43.

42 New York Tt'anscript at 293-94. 48 Cleveland Hearing at 411. that. 441d. at 412. Sidney Ingerman and George Strauss have concluded .

Many of the same problems of inadequate teaching staff, limited f~ci~it~es, and , ment that does not reflect current production pra:tices tha~ '~c ~, In re?u­

eqwp tional schools are present in MDTA .institutlonal trammg. Prepanng lar d

voca• 'I d N Youths for Jobs" Poverty and HI/mati Resources Abstracts, Un erpnVl ege egro ,.

Vol. 2, No.4, at 11 (July-AugUst 1967).

45 Voice of the GllCtto at31. 40 Cleveland Hearing at 421-22. 47 rd. at 427-28. 48 ld. 428. 49 !d. at 428-30. 50 New York, Transcript at 293-94.

114

"

51 Voice of the Ghetto at 10. The McCone Commission Report at 42 found that:

Programs under this act [MD1'A] have established high entrance requirements and aI'e pdmarily conducted in the classroom. Thus, training under the act skims the crc:am of the unemployed, and unfortunately it seldom includes the most disadvantaged. .

More than half of the MDTA trainees in 1963 were high school graduates. Man­power Report of the President at 253, Table F-3. (1964).

In 1964, only some 80,000 persons were trained under MDTA. There is some evidence that they were the "cream" of the unemployed, i.e. 'more educated and younger. Becker, Haber and Levitan, Programs to Aid the Unemployed in the 1960's 27-28 (1965). In 1965, the Act was amended to provide for special projects to meet the employment problems of disadvantaged youth, displaced older workers, members of minority groups and other "similar" groups. 42 U.S.C.A. § 2572(6) as amended (Supp.1966). In 1966 the program Was reoriented admin­istratively to put greater emphasis on training the disadvantaged, who repre­~ented a little more than twa-fifths of the persons enrolled in MDTA programs in 1965 and 1966. Manpower Report of the President 97 (1967). In 1967, some 250,000 persons are scheduled to be trained, 65 percent of whom, it is expected, will be "the hard-core unempl0:i'ed." !d. at 51.

52 Voice of the Ghetto at 11-12.

58 N "fV York Transcript at 272. An example of how meaningful employment can be-provided to MDTA graduates was described in Cleveland by Roy Berichon, training supervisor at Thompson-Rama-Woolridge, a company that employs a number of graduates. The company attributes its success in retaining and upgrading MDTA graduates to the fact that it provides a 90 day training period to these employees when they are hired 1n addition to training they received under MDTA. Cleveland Hearing at 438-43.

Another example of a program that attempts to place unskilled persons in meaningful jobs which in some cases may lead to professional positions is the "New Careers Program" which combines work and training in semi-professional categories such as teachers' aides, nurses' aides, etc. See Bay At'ea Hearing 528-48. See also the Manpower Report of the President 57 (1967).

54 Cleveland Hearing at 633. Ingerman and Strauss state:

Because unions can delay the inception of training programs in a local area under their jurisdiction (where they believe there is an adequate supply of workers), there arc few youth programs in or related to apprenticeable trades. In general, training for jobs in organized high paying occupations is restricted. "Preparing Underprivileged Negro Youths for Jobs," Poverty and Human Resource.r Abstracts, Vol. 2, No.4, at 10-11 (July-August 1967). (Emphasis added).

The authors, although concluding that the Successes of MDTA "have been substantial," also cite the following additional problems:

Although the Government has ambitious plans to extend OJT [On-the-Job Training], its present scope is primarily confined to upgrading those already employed, or, in the case of construction workers, those who belong to a union­ized craft but arc temporarily out of work. To receive a regular MDTA allowance, an unemployed worker must have had two yca~s ,work experience. Unemployed youth, age 17 to 21, who do not qualify for th~' regular allowance receive a maximum of $20 a we!'.k (and then they must have bren out of work a year). This is hardly enough to provide much motivation for youths who have little interest in school.

115

Though "skills centers" have been established in many cities to meet the needs of unemployed Negroes (and other disadvantaged groups), these centers often give little attention to the problems of youthful dropouts. On the other hand, when special youth projects are set up under agencies such as the Office of Economic Opportunity, these centers have problems in acquiring MDTA training slots. ld.

65 The number of apprentices active in apprenticeship programs registered with the U.S, Department of Labor, Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training, in 1964 was 170,474. Of these, 59,491 were new registrants. Many programs are not registered with the Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training. The most re­cent survey (1963) of unregistered apprenticeship programs estimated that more than 232,000 workers were taking apprenticeship training in unregistered pro­grams. F. Ray Marshall and Vernon M, Briggs, Jr., The Negro atld Apprentice­ship 20-21 (1967) [hereinafter cited as Marshall and Briggs].

50 "[T]he available evidence for the country and for particular areas demon­strates that, with recent exceptions, there have been very few Negro apprentices in the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that Negroes constituted 1.90 per cent of apprentices in the labor force in 1950 and 2.52 per cent in 1960. .•. According to the census figures, there were 2,190 Negro apprentices in 1950 and 2,191 in 1960. ... the only apprenticeship classificadons in which Negroes even approximated their proportion of the total work force in 1960 (10.6 per cent) were the building trades not elsewhere classified. Withm the building trades, Negroes have been concentrated primarily in the lahorers' jobs and in the so-called trowel (cement masons, plasterers, and bricklayers) and the carpentry trades." Marshall and Briggs at 26-28, citing data from "Occupational Characteristics" in U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population, 1950, Vol. IV, Pt. 1, Chap. Band "Occupational Characteristics", in U.S. Bureau of Census, U.S .. Census of Popu­lation, 1960, p. 26.

57 Voice of the Ghetto at 22. ' liS U,S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports: Spedal Census of

Cleveland, Ohio, April 1, 1965, Series P-28, No. 1390. 51l Cleveland Hearing at 454. 60 [d, at 455. 01 [d. at 788. 02 [d. s8Id. 64.ld. The Electrical Workers Union had a total membership of 1,500 mem­

hers including 240 apprentices. Four of the members were Negro: two journey­men and two apprentices. The Sheet Metal Workers Union had 1,190 members; 45 were Negroes. These Negro journeymen were working for companies manu­facturing sheet metal products at the time the companies were unionized; thus,. through shop unionization, these Negroes were able to gain entry into the union. All of the Negro members were employed in factories and were not found on any construction jobs. The union had 68 apprentices, all white. ld.

05 Report to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by the California Depart­ment of Employment, Bay Area Hearing, Exhibit No. 17 ..

66 Information concerning the racial composition of unions and of apprentice­ship training programs in the Bay Area is not readily available. The California Di'lision of Apprenticeship Standards made a survey of apprenticeship training

116

programs in 1964 but did not release it until 1966 h asked for it. The Commission has not b bl ' w en State Senator Dymally from the Division. een a e to get more up-to-date information

F. Ray Marshall and Vernon M Bri s Jr . . tion in Apprentt'ceship Programs' p gg, d" illda report entitled Negro Participa-

f ' repare un er contract w'th th Us D ment 0 Labor and later published b k 1 e.. epart-I · . . as a 00 (see suln'a note 55) d th d' cu ty In obtammg apprenticeship inf " Sr'. note e iffi-

. ormatIon ill an FranCISco. In no City has information been more difficult to ath . by no means limited to our study It i. d . d g. er. The unpasse, however, is Division of Apprenticeship Standa;d eOie , It seel~S, to al~. The ••• State selfish child with his toys (p.303). s, .. guards the InformatIOn it has like a

Although since its formation the E ual Em I . has had authority to require unions t \ p 0Jment OpportuOlty Commission until July 20, 1967 that the Co"'~: ? eep re~ord s ~nd submit reports, it was not 1 · ~uSSl0n exercISe thiS auth· 0 th ocal umons and Joint Apprentice h' P onty. n at date, all

required to keep records of appl:c:;ts rOfa~~ covered by the regulation were Aug. 1, 1967. Joint Apprenticeshi Pr~ a miSSions and ,referrals by race as of containing the information thu/ reco;::sb we~~ :eq;lred to file their forms thereafter. Unions were reouired to iiI • l £ p. 0, 1967, and annually a~uallY thereafter. 32 Fed.~Reg. 10650.

e SInU ar orms by Nov. 30, 1967, and

Bay AreaHearinga.t313-14. 68 !d. at 327. 69 Vaice of the Ghetto ~,t 12. 70 Cleveland Hearing at 457, 460 470 472· B .

kowitz v. Farrell, 9 Race Rei. L. Rep. 393 d96~Y) A1'~a Hearing at 338. ;n Lef­was ordered by the then New York State Co .. a s eet ,metal.wo~kers union end its nepotic apprentice selecu'on OmmIss1on Agamst D.lscnmination to . system. ne ground of the C .., d .

SIon was that previous racial discrimination h d ommlSSlOn s eCI-members of.the local and the ne ti .a prevented Negroes from becoming See for a dis~ussion of Lefkowit:oM~ 1ra~~ce~ perpetuated such discrimination. D%crimi?ation in Employment, ch. t(1~~6)·. overn, Legal Restraints on Racial

Cle(leland Hearing at 470.

12 Ba~ ~l'ea Hearing at 338. In 1964, Mr. Mazzola wrote in a union publication' eml War General Arthur McArthur (sic] , • • Doug:1as McArthur, (sic], g(J~ into West poi~a~l~ It. that his s~n, the .late General West Pointer, saw to it that his son got th t, Wise ex-PreSIdent EISenhower, a wants to do the same thing and h I hisere too

h• ••• And yet, when a craftsman

Wh ep son e gets the b . at really bugs me about th' b efi.' usmess ••••

buildin trad ' IS e ng agamst the father-son traditi(;n in the c~ftsrn!n wa~~~:s~e d:~: ~:o~e~~e of this tradition, the skill deVeI~ped by of the country. g (: years, all, of course, to the great benefit

"Memo to th M b ". . S F

. e em. ers, PIpe L,nes (Publication of Plum her's Union Local 38 an ranclSco) April 1964 t 1 . db' d D • . . '.. a, as Cite y Strauss and Ingel'man "Publl P l'

an IscnmmatlOn ill Ap . hi" l' ,c a ICY S al prentlces p, 6 Hastmgs L. Rev 285 304-05 (1965)

ee so Assembly lnt . C· .' , . L . I erun otnnUttee on Industrial Relations [0£ the Cal'f . egis ature] 1965-67 Ap'it '.l ' • • . 1 orma aft • d' D 'rrenttcesmp Tralmng, Staff Report! 13 (1966) [h .

erclte as ymally Report]. ~rem-

78 Cleveland Hearz'ng at 444-45. 74. [d. at 450.

117

.a...--

.. M' h' S t AdvI'sory Committee reported to 75 In 1966~ the CommisslOn's IC Igan ta e

the Commission th:tt:

h[L] it~~ effort il~~~e b~~e ~~~~r t~f ~U~!~~~::;~:~:!~~~;i~o~:!~~S s'~:~f~a~~~ ave C<:n av~ .' • mmittee had received an applIcatIOn rom a

knew of no mstance where ';;15 co ld know about an opening he answered, Negro. When asked how a egro. wou . Commission] and the Board

"We tell ~e Michig~a!~Cw~~;~;y::::n~i~:~[~;tion of informatio,n to the~.:· of Education about ~ C. th United States CommissIOn on GlVlt Michigan State AdvIMso!,~. o~mBlmttcpelot'y°mell~ Problems of Not/white Youth 15 Rights, Report all. u:tIIgan. (1966). ,

76 Cleveland Hearing at 457. Similarly> in San Francisco nei~herTthe :lu~bers . b f the Alameda Buildincr and ConstructIon ra es o~n-

Umon nor me~ ers 0" A' I:> are engaged in any affirmatlVe ciffl-an a~sociatLOn ~o~fty!O:e:b~~~h~;rn t~~;ay Area, although the Ope~ating e orts to 10crease m ", , I e tly under considera­Engineers has a preapprentlceship tra1O!llg propos~ pres :30 319 309-10 Mr tion by the Department of Labor. Bay Area l!ea1'tn~ at wh th~ craft u~ion~ Childprg, business representative of the CouncIl, explamed y

were not seeking new members: , h 'b Why do we want to attract people to non-existent jobs,

We don t ave any JO s. ' you know? 1Ii.at 319,

Mr. Mazzola of the Plumbers, echoed this statem~nt, F;[ t?e}as~ y;a;h:~~~ h If h lumbers have not admitted any apprentices. e lU Ica e, . u~io~ ~a~ a large, dissatisfied unemployed membership and that hIS prImary

responsibility was to the Hunio~.ld. at 3t2h8e' War on Poverty Thomas policastro,

T t'fying at Senate earmgs on " P ~~ I t f the Rhode lsland AFL-CIO, stated that opening up craft umons to

~;gS~o:~ ;as '\undoubtedly one of the most difficult jobf,? our labth°rtnfl00rve::~yt

d . h M people forget 0 cou:rse, a ,

Ei~~:p:j~::~~i:li~ : i~~:~J. ~:~tht~':h:":~:::g'S j:~=; . h h h e the steady employment, t ey are guar III

:lty, n~w lna~ ~ ;~inka~t goes without saying in some respects more jealously ~alou~y, h Id be" Hearings Before the Subcommittee ott Employment, Man­poa;er :;; ;Ouvel'ty ~f the Committee on Labor and Public Wtl/fare, 90th Cong.,

1stSess.,Part5, p. 1661. .. E ' 0 d r calling for non-77 In 1941, President Roosevelt Issued ~n xe.cutlVe r . eO' No 8802

d' . , tion in employment in defense lUdustnes. ExecutIVe roer . , ' 6I;:~~;e~. 3109 (1941). He subsequently extended this po~ic~to al!7c;;t(~~~~)'

. £ ernment Executive Order No. 9001, 6 Fe. .eg. .' agencIes 0 gov, (1943) and mad(~ it clear that thIS Executive Order No. 9346, 8 Fed. Reg. 7183 '1 8 F d Re 15419 (1943).

olic was mandatory. Letter to the Attorney Genera, e.. g. . ~ucc~eding Presidents also issued Executive Orders reaffirmtng

1and strenpgth~ndlenn~

. . , t ontract emp oyment. reSI . this policy of nondiscrimmatton 10 gove;:;n

d c R 12303 (1951)' President

Truman, Executive Order No. 10308, e. ego 5655 (1954)', President Eisenhower, Exec.utive Order No. 105557'2~9 FF~d·i:e~. 1977 (1961): Executive K dy Executive Order No. 1092 , e. g . '

Oednne

N, 11114 28 Fed Reg. 6485 (1963) made the non_discriminatlOn reqUlr~­

r er . O. ,. • h' h had not prevI­ment applicable to federally assisted constructlOn contracts. w IC

118

i f ~ ~--------------------------....

ously been covered. The policy is currently in force in Executive Order No. 11246, 30 Fed. Reg. 1231 (1965). Implementing regulations are contained in 41 C.F.R., Ch. 60. For a description of the earlier Executive Orders see Paul H. Norgren and Samuel E. HilI, Toward Fair Employment ch. 7 "Presidential Fair Employ­ment Committees-1941-1963" (1964).

78 Contractors must agree to the following provision:

The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for em­ployment btcause of race, creed, color or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin. Such action shall include, but not be limited to the following: employ­ment, upgrading, demotion or transfer; recruitment or recruitment advertising~ layoff or termination; rates of payor other forms of compensation; and selection for training, including apprenticeship, ••• 41 C.F.R. § 60-1.3(b) (1).

79 Section 209 of Executive Order 11246 provides for a variety of sanctions in the event of non-compliance with the contractual provisions executed pursuant to the Order. These sanctions include requesting the Department of Justice to bring injunctive proceedings to enforce the contract; recommending that the Department bring a suit based on unlawful discrimination in employment in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; cancelling or suspending existing contracts; rendering the contractor ineligible for future contracts, and conditioning maintenance of existing contracts or eligibility for future contracts upon a program offuture compliance.

80 For the purpose of referral, the union maintains out-of-work lists for each craft. TYpically, if the union is unable to furnish qualified workmen within 48 hours, the contractor may secure workmen from any other source. See e.g. the agreement between Local 38. Plumbers and Pipefitters and the Associated Plumbing, Heating and Cooling Contractors of San Francisco, summarized in Local Uniott 38 atld Hat1t'll, NLRB No. 20-CB-1297 (1966). This agreement puts workers into three groups for purposes of determining priority of referral. Group I (first priority) consists of workmen employed by a contractor member of the association for over 1200 hours during the past 2 years; Group II (second priority) of workmen employed over 1200 hours in the Bay Area during the past twO years; and Group II[ (third priority) of all other journeymen.

This agreement is based on Section 8(f) of the Labor Management Relations Act, 49 Stat. 452, as amended, 29 U.S.C. 158(£) (1964), which per­mits construction union hiring halls to· 'lccord a preference t6 worker~ based on their' length .9f >service with an employer, in the industry or in the geographical area. Before 1959, when the "length of service" requirement was legalized by the landrum-Griffin Act, the practice of "dosed shops" was prevalent in the construction industry. Apruzzese, "Prehire and the Local Build­ing Contractor," ~8 Geo. L.J. 387 (1959). Together with widespread racial discrimination> that practice made it impossible for Negro craftsmen to build up any length of service. The coH~ctive bargaining agreements made since 1959

{, "froze" Negro workers in the disadvantageous position to which they were rele­gated by discrimination. Since white workers obtained a preference based on length of service, Negroes never could catch up with them so as to accumulate enough experience. Thus, Fedex:al law itself perpetuates the effects of prior union discrimination.

119

------ -------- ----------------- -------

81 Federal law prohibits discrimination against non-union members in hiring hall referrals. 29 U.S.C. 158(b)(2); NLRB v. Motmtain Padfic Chaple1' of Associated General Contract01'S, Inc., 270 F.ld 425 (9d1 Cir. 1959).

82. In Local Union 38 and Havill, NLRB No.20-CB-1297 (1966). the National Labor Relations Board found that a Bay Area local of the Plumbers Union (whose business manager,Joscph Mazzola, testified at the Commission's hearing) had dis­criminated in referral against a non-union plumber because of the latter's lack of membership. The union refused to refer the non-member for a job, although no competent union plumbers were available, and it forced the employer of the

non-union plumber to fire him. 88 Raymond Dones, a Negro electrician in the Bay Area, testified that minority

workers who are not union members usually are put last on the list of men to

be referred out. Bay Area H caring at 354. 84Jd_ at 287-89,302. 85 Based on BART Ethnic Count of On-Site W orkfo1'ce, conducted between

May 12-18, 1967, submitted May 25, 1967, Bay Area Hearing, Exhibit No. 42. Among the total workforce of 1,391 in the eight job categories surveyed, there

were 309 Negro employees; 243 of them were employed as laborers. The affirmative action program requires that each contractor and subcontractor,

before the award of the contract, shall submit a program of affirmative action to provide equal opportunity based on the following 9 points: (1) cooperation with unions to provide equal opportunity; (2)· participation in joint apprenticeship committees to achieve eql.lal opportunity; (3) sponsorship of minority group per­sons who should be sought out for pre_apprenticeship training; (4) assistance to minority-group youths in entering apprenticeship programs; (5) upgrading of minority group workers; (6) seeking out minority group referrals of applicants; (7) ensuring that all recruiting activities are carried out,on a nondiscriminatory basis; (8) publicizing equal opportunity policies to subcontractors, employees, and referral sources; (9) encouragement of bidding by minority group subcon­tractors. Memorandum and attachment from Edward C. Sylvester, Jr.! Di­rector, Office of Federal Contract Compliance, U.S. Department of Labor, to Heads of all Agencies, Dec. 22, 1966; Memorandum from Edward C. Syl­vester, Jr., Director, Office of Federal Contract Compliance, U.s. Department of

Labor, to Heads of Agencies, Feb. 6, 1967. The 9-point program is unusually vague- Although it theoretically is '/result-

oriented:' no results in terms of employment of either apprentices or journeymen are specified. The contractor promises to use his "best efforts" in a variety of directions, and, ill the absence of total inaction, it is difficult to see how he could be found in noncompliance, even if none of his efforts are successful.

The weakness is illustrated by the affirmative action program submitte(1 to BART on March 2, 1967 by Kiewit-Traynor, a subcontractor! as part of its pre­award conference (a $12,739,618 contract was awarded to the company on March 9, 1967). At no point does Kiewit-Traynor pledge that it will hire minori~y journeymen or apprentices. It does not even pledge that the company w1ll sponsor minority persons for pre-apprenticeship training or that it will seek out minot:ity referrals, as required by the OFCC Dec. 22, 1966 Memorandum (supra). Instead, the Kiewit Program is based largely, on the initiation of requests to.

120

unions and joint apprenticeship committees to expand opportunitie £ . • perso~s (I~ems (2) (3) (:) and (5) of the Kiewit agreement). S~c:ra~:~:l~~ promIsed IS to contact unIons and to remind them of their bI" ., d' cult t h th 0 19atIOnS, It IS un-

o see ow e government ever can find non-compliance by Kiewit if no results whatsoever are achieved. by these contacts See Affirmati' A t~ evepn

K' 'T' . ve CIon ro-.

gram, Iewlt- raynor, JOInt Venture, copy in Commission's Bay Are H . File. a eanng

sa Bay Area Hearing at 292, 299. 87 Id. at 298-99. 88 Id. at 341. 80 Id. at 344. 90 Id. at 345.

01 Ai Clem of the Operating Engineers stated that his union would insist that te contrac~or pay the top man on the out-of-work list. Bay A1'ea Hearing at 309.

amar C~llders and Joseph Mazzola, representing the Alameda Buildin and Co~truct1on Trades Council and the Plumbers and Pipefitters res ec~vel testified that the union might strike or walk off Id at 321 330 • P y,

92/d. at351. •. ,.

\laId. at 360. 94 Id. at 365. 951d. at 363. The DymalJy Report recommended that:

, , • official sanctions, incltlding tll(! wilhllolding or ca'/cella/I'on of b d' , ,government co~tract.r. ,e lCected With greater force and frequency against those firms and/or ~~:ns Whl~h c(lntinu.e to ~iscriminate or refuse to provide the necessary informa-

I on therr appr~t1ceshlp programs, TI/ele sanctions sholiid be (It/opted at fed­era , state, and paruculariy local levels, and should be far stronger in effect th the ~ere deregi~tr~tion of discriminatory programs. The state Fair Employme:~ Practlc~ COmmIS$10~ and county and city human rights commissions should be ~uth~n;zed to prescnbc procedures for securing contract compliances (emphasis Ul Ol'lglllnl). (Letter of Transmittal of Staff to Chairman Dymnlly).

u~ The power to suspend the award of contracts was first used in Cleveland in ~prmg. 1967. ~of !uly, 1967, ttu:ee general contractors working on 6 projects

ad agreed to mmoflty representation in each job category, presumably with the agreement of local unions who suffered, along willi the contractors the economic consequences of the suspension of Federal .contract awards. Me:norandum of July 17, 1967 from ~drian Dove to Edward C. Sylvester, Jr., Director, OFCC, and attachme~ts. PrlOr to the suspension of contract awards in Cleveland, the OFC? comphanc~e efforts had resulted in the admission of two Negro journey­m~~ mto craft umons OVer a period of a rear. Cleveland Hearing at 490.

See ¥arshall (lfld B1'iggs at 11-13, 14-15. One way in which the Federal gov­ernme~t supports apprenticeship programs registered with the Department of Labor 15 by allowi.ng the ?ayment of less than joutn~yman wages to apprentices on Fe?eral c?nstru~~on proJe~~. A~seJit this provision, apprentices would have to be

. prud the· prevrulmg wage, whIch is higher. 40 U.S.C. § 276a (Supp. 1966)' 41 CFR . § 50-201.1101. Registered programs also benefit from Federal gran~ to vocatIonal schools under the Vocational Education Act of 1946 20 U.S C § 15 et seq. • . •• ,

121 271-9170-67-9

IlS Th A f Au 16 1937 50 Stat. 664, as amended, 29 U.S.C. § 50, provl?es

th th eU

: DO epa!ne~t of Labor shall promote labor standards for ahPprentlce .. at e •• . . h' ograms Under t at statut~,

ship and shall cooperate WIth. Stated appreln~ces ltr~ set forili Federal standards th Department of Labot' has ISSue regu atlonS w . h th a:d provide for "registration" of apprentice training programs whic meet ose

standards. 29 C.F.R. Part 30. l' f e tices shall be "on 9929 C.F.R. § 30.3(a) provides that the se ectlOn ,0 appr n

th b . of qualifications alone". Section 30.4( a) proYldes: e aSIS . . , meetln the minimum qualifications requlre-

Where, the numb.: of :P~lca~~ of job gopenings, "qualifications alone" means ments 15 greater ,an t e urn nk td on the basis of criteria which measure co~­(a) ~at the ~ppl~cants arc ra. e titude tests, etc,) and are 'sdected on the b~sls paratlve qualifications (e.g" fair aPl k' h individual criteria which of the )'ankings, ?r (b) ~at .wit 1O~t :: ~~gid:an~ify the "bes; qualified" in a measure comparat~ve qual cationS a e number of a renticeship openings and total number not 10 excess of the total

f . th' J:! "best qualified" group is

the order of selection for employment rom WI m ~ determined through any nondiscriminatory system. ,

d. . f BAT regulations governing discrimination in apprentice pro-

For a ISCUSSlon 0

grams, see Marshall a~d Briggs at 197-201. .00 Cleveland Hearmg at 467-75. , h' Council enables 10129 C.F.R. § 30.16. Registration with the State A~prent1ces Ip th U· d

. ' ifi hich is tecogn17..ed throughout e mte apprentIces to obtam a cert cate .w, f ents In addition employers States and helps apprentices in o~amm~ dr~~~:;ate ~tandards fo: competent know that a registered pro~a;f as ~~ m M't hell Deputy Director of the Office training.lnform:t~on obtame ~o~ en . l~: Training u.s. Department of of Special ActiVities, Bureau a ,ppresntl~es 1SP 1967 Co~ission Files. Labor. Memorandum of conversatIOn, ep., ,

10:l Cletleland Hearing at 476-77. lO$1d,at468,472. ," d ·S d 'th a boy who 1041d. at 469-70. Mr. Kilbane e.xplal~e~ tN~:n~:lw:ys ~e ~~y that's going

gets an extremely high grade on ~hIS aptltu e ~ d after six months he is starting to make the best plumber. SometIrties YOlI can n ' to tell the plumber what to do," Id. at 471.

105]d, at 477-78. 106 Id. at 478-79. 101 ld. at 479. 108

122

;;~e;: thDh:uS~n~g~~!np:~j~;~~~i,ti:a~:i~E~~~ ~~~:t~:~~~~N:ie~y~t~~k; movmg, ,. • d d b 2 0 percent 111 ew or, increased by 3,0 percent. H~wever, I: ecrease Y , n les Cleveland, St. Cbicago, Philadelphia. De\l'Olt, 'Yas~lOg~On, Db?"dL~~ ~e!\o~k the drop was Louis, Newark, Cincinnati, and Pitts urg ;o~lOe k :3 1 percent. and in Pitts-8.2 percent; in Philadelphia, 3,~ perc;nt; 11n ewar l' and' the Ordeal of purgh 47 percent. D. p, Moynihan 'Emp oyment, neome, the N;gr~ Family," 94 Daedalus 745-53 (Fall 1965), . '

, ' £ 'I e to match available jobs With available One of the pr)tDe causes of fthlS ~1 ~r • t th· suburbs and out of large central personnel IS the movement 0 neW)O s 10 0 e

cities.. .. , f

The steady trend of .this ~OyeJ~e?t is ei1~tra~fd:~r;~~1i~~~c:~::~t:ili~ ~e;: factory and co~mel'Clal, buUdmg

b5 1I1d th & alue of building pernlits issued,

in the central city as eVidenced Y ata on e v

, _______________ ~ __ ',.., '.' --,_ -".,-,"i~-"'-''"'''~-::;'''

both recently (1960-65) and since 1954 ••.• In the same. periods, also, a tela­tively large proportion &f community buildings, such as schools and hospitals, has been constructed in the suburbs instead of the city. These buildings represent a large capital investment, leading to substantial increases in suburban employment, especially in industry, retail and wholesale trade, and businl;Ss, professional, and· technical services. Many of these jobs created arc within the capabilities of the people who need employment opportunities) but most of the new jobs are ~oo distant and tlifficult to reach. Dorothy Newman, "The Dec<lOttalil!:ation of lob~'" 90 Monthly Labor Rcvlclv 7 (May 1967).

10~ Bay Area Hearing at 402. "The trend to place new structures in the suburbs-·particularly those devoted to factories and tradel' and to a smaller extent, to schools and hospitals-is especially marked in the No:rth, where central cities of the largest SMSA's tend to be old and the flight of population to the suburbs has been going on for many years, Northern cities are flrequently handicapped by narrow streets, one way traffic patterns, obsolescent structures, and rapidly changing neighborhoods." Newman~ supra note 108 at 8. See also J. R. Meyer, J. F. Ka.in, M. Wahl, The Ut'ban Tra11sport{ltion Problem chapters 1, 2, and .3 (1965).

110 Bay Area Hearing at 276. lll. Cletle/and Hearing at 102. "The movement of industry from the central

city has ~eparated the place of .residence of the unemployed or under-employed worker from prospective places of work. [As a result 1 . . . the unemployed worker no longer has adequate labor market information readily accessible to him, Workers usually find employment through leads they receive from friends and neighbors and by applyillg at the plant gate. Where the neighbors are unemployed or are employed only in industries which are not expanding or in the type of low paid occupations where working conditions l1,re undesirable, these usual methods of finding jobs are not helpful. Many of tht>, br'\er jC'b~ that are available are in expanding industry located far from the job-seeker's place of residence. They are not made known to him even through help wanted adver­tisements in newspapers since factories outside the central city are likely to place their advertisement for help in local neighborhood papers." The Ma11power Revolution in the Celltral City, address by Louis F. Buckley, Regional Adminis­trator, U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Employment Security before the Fordham University Alumni Institute, Nov. 2, 1966, entered into the Record of the Ribicotf Subcommittee Hearings, pt. 8 at 1780 (1966),

112 Bay .Area Hearing at 16 and 588. 118 "Public transportation to the suburbs is usually expensive, often circuitous,

or simply not available .... The distances for which public transportation is provided vary, but it is obvious that a minimum of $3 a week. (or almost $15 a month), plus more than an 'hour a day, including transfers and waiting, would have to be spent by a city resident to work in the suburbs. Furthermore, rush­hour schedules are not usually arranged to speed transit users to the outside in the morning and to the inside in the evening, as is frequently done £orcommuters in the opposite direction.

There is substantial evidence that central city residents using public transport spend more money and time to reach suburban jobs than those commuting to the city. Those wanting jobs at a substantial distance, or beyond bus or rapid transit !illes, pay an especially high price. According to estimates by. the Traffic Commission of New York City, it would cost a worker in Harlem $40 a month to commute by public transportation to work in an aircraft plant in Farmingdale

123

. I in Yonkers or portchester (Westchester) or in (Long Island), In a parts Ph,ant d St t n Island:' Newman, supra note 105 II. basic chemIcal plant or s Ipyar on a e

at 9-10, , ' , " ' entral cities do not have an automobile, "Most nonwhIte famlhes Im,ng ~n~ of thl~ 14 central cities in the Standard

Fewer than half owned a car meg tud The six cities where half or Metropolitan Statistical Areas selectded for s Yal' 11'n the Midwest or the West:

h ' f '1' s wne a car were , more of the,no~w Ite amlle

h,\ "ld at 11. Based on Ce1lSUS of Housmg:

where mecit:ln Incomes are Ig est.· HC (1) No 1 table 19 1960, United States SummarYJ States a,nd sm~ Areas

J, F. Kain I M, W~h1 supra

(U.S. Bureau of the Census). See also, J. R. eyer,. I

note 1{}9. 114 Bay Area Hearing at 601-02.

"115 Gary Transcript at 29. f '1' ' welfare live in public housing 110 Id at 38-39. Although many amiles on , 'th ro'ecte Mrs

, t' they dislike the impersonality and lack of pnvacy 1Il e P J~' • proJec s, . 'fi d Hattie Mae Dugan, in Cleveland, test! e : ,.

• hId 't, lly go for ProJects, I don t " . , I would lOdl'c to livJ td~:~~~~r to O:~~~ w~~; t~e: next neighbor is cooking, hke to be coope up an , t 31 what they are saying, ••• Cle(Je/and Hel#'/lIg a • • h" bi'

. P H'll o'ect in San FranCISco t e pu lC Robert Jacobs said that 1U ,~~e otrero th~ p~ lmake one feel like they are a part housing administration hasn t done any 109 'f h uld he testified. Bay Area of this city." Many tenants would move out 1 t ey co ,

Hearing at 53. 117 Gary Transcript at 29-30. . . 118 Racial Isolation in the Pttbltc Sch?ols a~~3-~4:' t' in housing include: 119 Recent publications documentlOg lsCrUlmm<lClOn.. on Civil Rights

Ad . C 'ttee to the S ommlSSlon ) Massachusetts State VISOry OmIDI

D, ' , t:' t' the Shl'itlgfield-Holyoke-

M h tt · 'Housing tscrttmna ton n r Report on assac use s. n . Ad ' Committee to the U.S, Chicopee Metl'opolitcw A"ea (19~6)~ U.tah .Stat~ H vls~ry . Utah (1966); Ten-Commission on Civil Rights, I?tscmnmthattonuts'1 c~;::l~fs:{~n on Civil Rights,

S Ad • sory Committee to e .. , A nessee tate VI . l' N h 'u .Davidson County Metropolttan rca Housing and Urban Reneev(1, ttl as VI e

(1967). 120 Clcveland Hearing at 175-77. il!lld. at 177. 122ld. at 104, 106. 123 ld. at 76.

12i ld. at 200. Ad' Committee to the U.S. 1M Proceedings Before the Tennesse~ State .vlsoDr

y 9-10 1966 at 122-23 Commission on Civil Rights in Nash~tlle, Tennessee ec. J

[hereinafter cited as Nashville Trans'",Pt]. , d' J 1967 that 76 promt-126Id. at 126-27. The New Yo~k Tunes rep~rte I~ une~alled'at 75 real estate

nent re~idents of Chicago's e;~lu{~~; n:::~ ~~~~:~ ;o~dNegroes, According to offices 1U that area on June 'd ) 'h 'udice on the part or 26 realtors the Times, the residents reporte outrtg t p~eJ for Ne roes to see homes and found 34 realtors who would.n~ake app')Int,~ts.oes out ~f more than 2,000 for sale. They::urned up only 38Nhsytln~ openJto ~r 1967 p A1 col. 4. homes in rlie are,~ 1 wted for sale. ,. J.lmes, une, .,

127 Bay Area Hearing at 215.

124

128 Proceedings Before the Georgia State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Com· missio1J on Civil Rights in Atlanta, Georgia April 8, 1967 at 333.

12D Bay Area He«ring at 103, 139, For discussion of discrimination by builders, see the material in the text relating to practices by users of FHA insurance, who are mostly builders and developers of multi-family housing units infra.

ISO Massachusetts State Advisory Committee to the U.S, Commission on Civil Rights, Discrimination in Housing in the Boston Metropolitan Al'ea 22 (1963).

lS1 Clevelatld Hearing at 178. 182 Bay Area Hearing at 103-06. lSS NaslJtJille Transcript at 309, 312. "In Metropolitan Washington, regional

planning Ilgencies recently devised a 'Plan for the Year 2000'. This plan is eg-

, sentially a general set of principles for meeting the needs of a population that is expected to grow to more than twice its present size before the end of the century. The plan suggests that future growtll be channeled along six radial 'corridors' extending outward in star fashion from the central city •..•

The plan, however, fails to take into account one vital consideration: the effect of race. If the movement of the city's population continues in its present directions, three of the planned corridors will be heavily Negro. They will have their central origins in neighborhoods which currently are Negro and which already are ex­panding outward in the directions proposed by the plan. The other three corridors will be almost exclusively white, since they originate in the only white residential areas that remain within the city. Thus segregation will be extended . • • into the new suburbs." Eunice and George Grier, "Equality and Beyond: Housing Segro gation in the' Great Society" 95 Daedalus 77, 88-89 (Winter 1966).

18~ Nashville Transcript at 309, 312. Mr. Deep also stated that in selecting sites for public housing he did not take into considerl1.tion whether the concentration of disadvantaged and Negro children in one school would depress the educational standards of that school. I d. at 313.

The H:!using and Urban Development Department defines an integrated public housing project as one "with white and Negro tenants without limitations of any kind on either group/' Statistics Branch, Housing Assistance Administration, Department ot Housing and Urban Development, Statisti..:s on HAA Operations, Occupancy in Federally-Aided LOtll-Rent Pttblic Housing As of September 30, 1966 at 11 (Section 223.0, Aug. 2, 1967). Thus, a project would be characterized as integrated if it had one Negro tenant and all the rest white tenants or one white tenant and all the rest Negro. Using this definition, HUD reported that on Sept. 30, 1967, 30 percent of the projects in the Nation were integrated. By Hrlll~ing Assistance Administration Regions, 75 percent of the projects in the New York region were integrated; Philadelphia, 50 percent; Atlanta, 7 percent; Chicago, 42 percent; Fort Worth, 16 percent; and San Francisco, 5!> percent. !d. at 9.

185 NctlJark Transcript at 118-19. 180 Tennessee State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil

Rights, Housing and Urban Renewal in the Nashvillc-Davidson County Metro­politan Area 1,10 (February 1967).

187 NCIl/ark Transcript at 199. 188 Cleveland Heating at 156-57. In its report on RaG"'!;/ Isolation in the Public

Schools, the Commission described several instances of segregation in public hous­ing projects. In San Francisco, six projects, totaling more than 2,300 units, each

125

predominandy Negro, are grouped on Hunte~s Point. T~e percentages of Negroes in th.e six projects in 1966 were: 72 (two proJects combmed)~ 9?, 94, 93, and 90. In Cincinnati two projects in close proximity to each other-Lincoln Court and Laurel Hom~-were together 99.7 percent nonwhite. in 19~6. "The most ,extreme example, perhaps, is Rob~rt Taylor Homes, ~ project 1D Chicago, Ope~e~ m 1961-62, it contains 4,415 units, 75 percent o£ them des.igned for larg~ famthes. Of ~e 28,000 tenants, some 20,000 are children. The enure occupancy 1S N~gro. • • . Racial Isolation in tht: Public Schools at 37-38 (1967) (footnote omitted).

189 Cleveland Hearing at 162. 140 Voice of the Ghetto at 16-17. 141 Cleveland Hearing at 165. 142 Jd 148 E~ec. Order No, 11063, 27 Fed, Reg. 11527 (1962). Und~r the terms ~f

the order discrimination is prohibited "in the sale, leasing, rental, or other diS­position ~f residential property and related facilities (including, land to be de­vdoped for residential use), or in the use or occupancy thereof" If stich property and related faciUties were provided tinder tcdeml aid agreements ~x~(:uted a~tel' the effective date of the Order, Nov. 20, 1962. Section 101. Thus, eXIstmg housl~g and housing not yet built, but with respect to which an agreement for finanCial assistance W:l,S made before Nov. 20, 1962, are unaffected by the ~andatory requirement of nondiscrimination. Such housing is coverc:d by SectlO~ 1,?2 of the Order which permits executive departments and agenCIes to us~ th~tr. good offices" in finding ways "to promote the abandonment of dlscpmmatory

practices." . . . The Ol'der covers only a fraction of the hom: fi.~anctn? m. which Federal

agencies play a part. "The great bulk or the nation S housmg IS financed~ not through the FHA or V A loan guarantee programs, but through conventlOn~ financing lo,truely through federally supervised mortgage lenders. Yet, all o£ thiS

, ' " "M Sl "0 Y 'Ex housing is excluded completely from coverage. . .. .' oane,,, ne. ear s -perience: Current and potential Impact of the Housmg Order, 32 Geo. Wash.

L. Ret!. 457 (1964 ) (footnote omitted). " 144 C. Abrams, "The Housing Problem and the Negro , 95 Daedalus 64, 69

(Winter 1966). • 14U The segregated housing patterns that exist today are due m large part to

racially discriminatory FHA policies in effect during the post World ~a~ II housing boom. FHA and the VA together have financed more than $~17 billton­worth of new housing since World War II. Less than twO percent of It has bec:

n

available to nonwhite families, and much 1)£ that on a strictiy segregated ~asls. In 1938 the official FHA UndenIJriting Manual cautioned h?mebuyers~ '!f a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall contmue to be occupied by the same social and racial group." The manual recommende? use of restrictive covenants to keep out "inharmonious racial ~rou~s." ~nd 1t provided a model restrictive covenant for any reader who couldn t wr:te hiS own. U.S, Commission on Civil Rights, Housing 1961 at 16 and 59; National C~m. mittee Against Discrimination in Housing, How the Federal Government Bmlds

• Ghettos) 18-19 (Feb. 1967). . d" • Negro applicants for FHA-insured housing often are subJected to 1scrt~tna-

tory practices. During the summer of 1966, members ()£ the Utah State AdVIsory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights telephoned 20 rental. agents for recently constructed FHA-financed apartments and asked them !f they

126

, " 1 \ f

would consider a Negro applicant for the housing they had advertised in the new.spaper. "l,'here wer~ tw~ positive responses, 10 negative answers lind eight eqUlvocal repites to the mqmry. Some of the responses were prefaced with state­ments such as: 'I wish I could,' 'I'm so sorry I can't' and 'The ndghbors wouldn't stand for it.' The results of the telephone inquiry were sent to the di­rector of the local FHA who notified the rental agents that they were in viola­tion of Executive Order 11063. A second telephone survey by the Subcommittee produced identical results and this information again WRS I.:onveyed to the local FHA office. This time the director said he paid personai caUs on each of the rental agents or owners." The report did not indicate what r~ults were achieved. Utah State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights Discrt'minatt'on in H otlsin g in Utah 5-6 (1966). '

The American Friends Service Committee recently documented the experience of a Negro homeseeker in Prince George's County, Md., who was required to make 69 telephone calls, attend 13 meetings, write 10 letters and obtain legal counsel bef?re he could buy a ~ome in an FHA-insured development. A Repol't to the PreSIdent: AFSC Expenence and Recommendations re: Executive Order 11063 on Equal Opportunity in Housing i-viii (1967) [hereinafter cited as AFSC Report].

The N~tional Committee Against Discrimination in Housing also reported the fol1owmg account of racially discriminatory practices by brokers managing and selling houses repossessed (and owned) by FHA:

In Philadelphia last year fair housing farces made a study of how FHA handles th~ properties it acquires. (FHA and the Veterans Administration together ac­qUire at least 100,000 such properties annually, most of them single-family houses and all of the~ su~ject to ,the Housing Order.) As in other cities, Philadelphia's FHA office gives Its acqUlred property listings to area real estate brokers who earn a commission for every property they sell. In "paired" tests of ten different brokers-a Negro applicant followed closely by ~ whit: applica~t-investigators disCl..lvered u a significant pattern of discrimina­tion belOg practiced by brokers who manage and sell such properties £~r FHA," HaUl the Federal Government Builds Ghettos at 27.

146 Memorandum from Henry B. Schechter, Director, Office of Economic and Market Analysis, Department of Housing and Urban Development, to Robert C. Weaver, Secretary, dated Feb. 21, 1967, copy in Commission Files on Low­Income Housing Study.

The total number of new FHA insured units from the date of the Executive Order to Oct. 31,1966 was 740,000; the total number of VA guaranteed or direct loan units for the sanle period was 427,000. Id.

H1 Bay Area Hearing at 183. 148 id. at 181.

• 14~!d, at 183. This view of the probable effect of a stringent enforcement policy 15 WIdespread throughout the agency. The AFSC Report stated that:

Housing agency staff often justify their failure to implement the Executive Order by dIe statement that recommended changes would nat be "good business" for FHA. T~ey ignore the fact that presen,t procedures, based on narrow concepts of good bUSIness, are very bad for the nation as a whole and have increased tlle bur­dens upon other arms of government, including other agencies in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (p. 4).

Secretary Weaver of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in a speech before the 1966 Conference of the National Urban League, stated that

127

FHA officials fear that strong backing of the Executive Order would reduce FHA volume and endanger their jobs in the process (Id. at 5).

150 Bay Area Hearing at 191. 151 !d. at 183. 'llI~!d. at 136. :153Id. :154 In it£ Report to the President, the APse denounced this practice:

We believe that this is an inappropriate and inadequate means for assuring compliance with Federal law and the Executive Order. OUf experience has shown that the minority buyer to overcome the barriers put in his way, would have to be a model of courage, endurance and knowledge, who has a strong fair housing council and perhaps a fee-less attorney at his side-and not have to worry about moving his family in time to enroll his children for the new school semester or to report for duty at his new position. When a N!;gl'o homeseeker must take the step of filing a complaint before he can 'secure a home, the Executive Order's mandate of nondiscrimination has not been met. Equal oppor­tunity in housing can not exist until discriminatory practices have been discon­tinued. Achievement of this end involves a positive approach and an inspection program which do not exist in either FHA or VA. AFSe Report at 4-5.

Former Attorney General Katzenbach when testifying in support of the Civil Rights Act of 1966, summarized FHA's enforcement efforts under the ~xecutive Order: 11 builders had been placed on an ineligible list, 4 <;>f whom had subse­quendy been reinstated; "about 118 complaints" had been received and "about 29 complainants" got their housing. Hearings before Subcommittee No.5, ot the H()'use Commt'ttee on the Judiciary on Miscellaneous Civil Rights Proposals, 89th Cong., 2d Sess., Ser.16 at 1311 (1966).

:155 Bay Area Hearing at 135. :156Id. mId. at 139. The AFSe Report made the following assessment of agency

action implementing the Order: "No guidelines for compliance by builders, brokers, and lenders have been established by the Federal agencies. No initiative has been taken to determin~ whether or not nondiscrimination and equal oppor­tunity prevail in the sale ofiederally assisted housing. The en£orcementmachin~ry, is so inadequate that deal' violations of the Order are usually not remedied unless there has been an enormous expenditure of time and effort by the com­

plainant and by concerned agencies" (pp. 2-3)., . The Committee concluded that;

1. Executive Order 11 063 is being widely and flagrantly violated by builder&; Lrokers and Il!Jlders.

2. Implementation of the Order by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA) has been at best ineffective, and at worst subversive of the goal of equal opportunity in housing (p, 1).

~58 Cleveland Hearing at 71. :159ld. Asked what had happened to his complaints, Mr. Simmons stated:

Two are still pending, They have no~ been settled. One was settled when the field representative met with the owner and the owner told him that the place had alre~dy been rented. The owner then sent me a letter advising me that when something else became available, he would so notify me. We were then invited out to see another place and we decided it was not what we wanted and we

refused it. ld.

100 Id. at 72.

128

)

r

Footnotes to Chapter 5. . :1 Rochester Hearing at 121. 2 Raciallsolation in the PubliC-Schools at 11-13 8 Bay Area Hearing at 683 . ~!d. at 673. •

51n Division Stl'cct, America by Studs T k 1 (1 of tape-recorded interviews Wl·th a ~r e f 967), a book which consists

cross-sectlOn 0 pe sr' . Chicago, a middle-aged white man wh 1 f b rhons Ivmg m and around I'. 0 eta su ur of Chiea . d lye and work ill the ghetto describ h' f . .go ill or er to

W ' '. es IS ormer neighbors as Irresponsible-

e Ie hVlng in t difi d • close friends of 0;;; a c:~e~t wor! s. ?ccasions have arisen when we visit

They'd immediately g~t us olU:~ s:je::~n t help but talk about the inner city.

.. . . When you're running away, as a retreat int b concerned. You might give a token " ,0 a su nr,b, you can't say you're week. But you can't convince res~onse, III economIc help or a few hours a

d" me you.re concerned Mo t £ th bl Iscussed In the abstract They inteUe t I' . s 0 e pro ems are

bomb or integration or housing it's ~ ua lze a g~eat deal. Whether it's the atom 6 ..' a wayS out t/lere. Away from them (p.321). Bay Area Hearmg at 457

1 !d. at 444. . 8 CletJeland Hearing at 208-10. 9 Bay Area Hearing at 612.

,10 Id. 11 ld. at 6W, 613. 12 Cleveland Hearing at 208-09 211 uB ' . ay Area Hearing at 619 624

d ' • 1 !d. at 624. On occasion, some com anies d .

positive steps to ease the housing problem~ of :m. unlOnsl

have taken the Armour Company closed its Kansas C't 1 mmon~ emp oyees. When operations to a new plant being built . n th I Y ,. ant anq tr~sferred part of its :Minnesota, 41 Ne roes and . 1 ~ w lte ~mrnuruty of Worthington, rights and beg g ki 4 ~anish-Amencans deCIded to exercise their transfer transfer a J' 0:::: ~:~ ng at e new plant. For a long period before the actual

, lon-management committee re ared th .. Worthington for the entry into it of members of rcin' ~ p "e ~tlzenS of tion resulted in the assimilation of th tr f ' onty groups. ThIS prepara-. . d e aus erees mto the community 'til ID

PIC1 ents, and without housing discrimination. James L. Stern "Ad' . tm

WI out

ant Closure: Cooperation in Plannin f ' JUS ent to a White Communiro " 90Mo thl Lab

g Ror ~e Transfer of Negro Workers Into

1GB A -~' n y 01' etJtt'w42 (Jan. 1967). ay rea Heuring at 571-72.

10 Id.at551. 17 !d. at 565-70. 18 ld. at 551-54, 558-59. lord. at 573. 20 !d. at 578. 21 Id. at 575. 22 !d. at 577.

129

~, ' .

28 Iii. Many businessmen earning a large portion of their incomes from mvest­ment in the ghetto feel no obligation to correct even those conditions directly connected with the source of their income or caused by the manner in which they manage their investment. In his study, George Sternlieb stated:

It is obvious that the substantial owner of slum real estate is not in business for altruistic purposes. The really active owner may buy and sel! parcels at a con­siderable rate. As such, the individual parcel may have little meaning fo;: him. It becomes an impersonal element in his business life, having no relationship to the fact that people live in it. For example, one of the major owners interviewed in the course of this study secured a parcel in . '. • [one of the Newark slum areas surveyed) as part of a package deal involving siJC parcels. He told the interviewer:

As soon as 1 bought the parcel; and I bought it as par~ of a package; I looked around to try to get rid of it. It was in lousy condition, and simply wasn't worthwhile keeping. It took me the better part of four years to sell the parcel in question. • . , It wasn't worth my while to improve the parcel since I planned on selling it.

In ~.his particnl:u- case the parcel, for three or four years, just consistently

degenerated. .. .. .. There is an obviot/s gap between otlJnership and feeling of responsibility. Tile Tenement Landlord at 139 (emphasis in original).

24 Boston Hearing at 142. See also Alice Mid and Edwin Kiester, Jr., The Short­changed Children of Sul>,ul'bia: What Schools Don't Teach About Human Differ­

ences and What Can beVone About It (1967).

25 Boston Hearing at 1M. A white policeman, interviewed in Terkd's Division Street, America (p. 82), expressed similar views, although in somewhat resigned

terms: You say you'd rather have your son go to a public school because he's gonna have

. to get along with tho~e people and he might as well start young. The sanle as going to school with the colored. You're going to have to get along with them. They're here, so 'you might as well go to school with them and get along with

them.

26 Boston Hearing at 162. 21 Marshall B •. Clinard, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, .

writing of the social reaction of nonslum dwellers to those who live in the slums, says that those in the larger community come to associate the ugly physical appear­ance, squalor, and difficult living conditions of the slums with the inhabitants themselves. According to Clinard, the resultant belief in the "natural inferiority" of the slum dwellers causes the social isolation of the slum dweller and his exclu­sion from participation in urban society. Slums and Comtmmity Development 14

(1966). 28 Bay Area Hearing at 690-91. 29 ltJ. at 610. 80 ltJ. at 680. 81 ltJ. at 680. 82ltJ. at 676. us ltJ. at 677. See also "A Time for Burning," a film made by fhe Lutheran Film

Association, which deals with an unsuccessful attempt to integrate a church in Omaha, Nebr. Division Street, America, supra note 5 at 141, recounts an incident reported by the wife of a lawyer in Evanston, Illinois, whose husband had

130

~~~""'""=-"~""""""~-------..

tried to lind a house in Evanston for a N £'1 Th that was available, through an agent andefe~h~l ~'. t ethla~;r knew of a house

, we It 0 e J. '1egro family: When he returned the key-perhaps th· , r' , say-he said to the agent, '1 have 'ust s~o~e:ns naLVetll as many p;:ople will doctor and his wife and they seem [0 think th ~e house. to a very nice Negro

at It s very nICe.'

He had n~ sooner left the house when the:: telephone started r' . next mornlOg, he had been accused of be' d ·tf I mgIng. By the to move a Negro family into this whit 109. ecel u and underhanded, trying these Negroes happened to be of the ~a::a;/m h.as ~one to OUt rector, because approved because he wanted our con . enommatlon as we, He thoroughly brotherly recognition of all people ftr~:~on to .b~ aw:e of the need for more Vilifying were the ones who went ~ ~u,rpnsmg at people who were so excommunicated, they would leave ~eo:U::'lste::r and said that if Jim were not

This was the first time we r cd h Ho'\y fea?, and it WaS fear o~e::ez ow, cruel your closest friends could be.

thad~r.bugh fear, they ca~yvilify ;e~:I:~~~ =l;sd':v:~~J::~~ property value--

From then on, we really knew where cod W way we did. This was one of those thinw~ ~ • e J:new why we stood the You have to become hardened to the h:te e v:ere ~omg to ha~e to stand on. those people you would like to call b youfr:e gomg to receive, even from

84 your est lends.

See, for an example to the contrary the C d f Eth· real estate transactions in neighborhoods und~r eo: 1~~ Pract~c~s governing by the Germantown, Pennsylvania Realty Boar! T: ~d ~ansl~on, a~opted pendix B of Eleanor Leacock Marti D .' e e IS repnnted 10 Ap­Integration in SubtWban FIousln an :ndae~tsch, ~d Joshua Fishman, TOttlara League of B'nai Brith at 44-45 g. t d .~ubhcation of the Anti-Defamation

55 B ,. ajl Area Hearing at 74.

sald. STId. at 74-75. 8BU. at 75. 89 ld. at 49-51. 40 ld. at 39. 41 ]d. at 18, 28. 421d. at 70. 43 Boston Hearing at 129-30. ·H ld. at 130. ~: I 4., <~-:"- _

46 (litftlei;'~il Hearing at 333-34 41 tl' .. '- •

~~t.:,..t 335;,;; 481t!:'· 49!d\lt342 •.. ;:;: 50 !d. at 340.:~'2 51 Rocl1¢ster E~aringat 115-18 52 Ia :;" •

after th~~ Is~~lt~cock, Deutsch and Fishman, supra note 34 at 34, commented

We have concluded that outright "prejudice" is n t th '. . for moving away from a chan . ,0 e most unportant motive clear how im ortant. 1SIIlg ~ommuruty •••• [M]any srudies have made cally in deIin1?· a role dsegregatlOn plays, both economically and psychologi-

, mg SUCCess an status for white Am' C ' • £ occupational positions often re ,ilies th ,~cans. , omj,)etltion or secure to have 'prestige' Th' q at one hvc m a neighborhood considered virtually so Th~ 't ~s means, amaril°~g other things, that it .must be all-white or

• I 15 not necess y those with the most obviously prejudiced

131

personal attitudes who move quickly, but those most co=itted to success and occupational status and most able to act quickly on this co=itment.

GS Rocltester Hearing at 121. 64 In the 1966-67 schclOl year, 25 children in Rochester (24 Negro and one

white) participated in the program. This year the program has been expanded to include an additional 39 children. Telephone conversation with William Heinrich, Coordinator of Personnel, West Irondequoit School District, Sept. 19, 1967.

55 Bay Area Hearing at 675. fi~ /d. 57 Cleveland Heart'ng at 613. 58 Newark Transcript at 198. 69 Cleveland Hcari11g at 454, 466.

Footnotes to Chapter 6.

1 Bay Area Hearing at 443. 2 The belief of Negro Americans,that white Americans have failed to com­

mit sufficient effort and resources to meet ghetto problems has been reported widely in recent months. See, for example, "The Hard-Core Ghetto Mood," Newsweek Magazine, Aug. 21, 1967, pp. 20-26; J. Anthony Lukas, "Postscript on Detroit: 'Whitey Hasn't Got the Message' H, N.Y. Times magazine, Aug. 27, 1967, p, 24; "Blow-Up in the Cities," The New Republic, Aug. 5, 1967, p. 5.

The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice has confirmed the widespread existence of this feeling:

The slums of virtually every American city h~I'ii6;:, 'j'nalarming amounts, not only physical deprivation and spiritual despair but ~so doubt anddowriright cynicism about the relevance of the outside wor1d's institutions and the sinccitity of efforts to cloSe the gap. Task Force Report: Juvenile Delinquency anil' , "f o#lh Crime 43 (1967).' '

S Bay Area Hearing at 270, 272. <1 Cleveland Hearing at 619. 6 Voice of the Ghetto at 5. 6 Bay Area Hearing at 249. 7 Los Angeles Transcript at 369-70. The McCone Commission noted

the contrast between efforts to improve slum schools in South Central Los.Angeles after the Watts riots in that area and the lack of similar efforts ip,,"':Meitcan American areas which had not experienced a riot: /' ',I

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A substantial improvement has been .made in library, cafeteria, and counseling facilities in schools in the South Central area, and many additional facilities nre progra=cd. (Regrettably there has not been a comparable improvement in schools in the Mexican American areas, and we sound a sharp note o£ concern on this point.) Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, Staff Report 0/ Action. Taken 10 Implement the Recommendations in the commission's Report 2-3 (1966). Letter of Transmittal from John A. McCone, Chairman of the Governor's Commission, to Edmund G. Brown, Governor' of the State of California.

8 Bay Area Hearing at 205. For an account of problems of d' .. . expl 't t' f Ch" IscnmlOatlon and

01 a Ion 0 lOese AmerIcans in San Francisco's Chinato liTh Other Fac £ Ch' " wn, see 'e , e 0 lOatown, a four-part series appearing in the SF' Exanllner, Aug. 14-17, 1967. an ranClSCO

a Bay Area Hearing at 231. :LO Cleveland Hearing at 339. l:L Bay Area Hearing at 277. i2/d. at 229. 18 ld. at 461. 141Los Angeles Transcript at 384-85 u .

Rochester Hearing at .8-9, 16 For a current review of Neg 0 th bl

Issue "Negro ¥.outh in America"r A~;st,P{;67e;:es:;oe;:~:::fa;jne, SPe;!;1 Young Negro In AmericaJ 1960-1980 (1966) roc tor, e

17B A R ' . ay."1.l'ea eartng at 284. 18 !d. at 445.

10 ld. An early prediction of a buildup of social unrest and potential violence among Negro ghetto youth was that of Dr. James B. Conaht, who wrote in 1961:

What I should like to do is to create in the reader's mind a feel' f ' and concern. For without be' I' mg 0 anxtety the total situation that has :e! :V:I:,~~t,~ :us~say th~t wfen one considers War II, one has reason to worry about the futur: Thegre bOuci!ltyd' sums s£ince World un I cd d fro • mg up 0 a mass of hemp oy ~ strated Negro youth in congested areas of a city is a social'

p enomenon. ~t ~ay be, compared to the piling up of inHammable material ' an :mpty buildmg m a city block. Potentialities for trouble-indeed 'bi!' ,'n of dlsaster-:Irc surely there, Sit/ms: and Suburbs 18 (1961). poSS! lties

20 Bay Area Hearing at 249. 21/d. at 269. 22 !d. at 55. 23 !d. at 42. 2'1/d. at 229. 25/d. 26 [d. at 233. 27/d. at 49. 28/d. at 48. 291d. at 461. 30 [d. at 55.

, .

U,S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1967 0-277-1117

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